Arts & Lectures
2001-2002 Season Lecture Series News Release
For Immediate Release

January 2, 2002
Contact: George Yatchisin
(805) 893-3494
e-mail: yatchisin-g@sa.ucsb.edu

Best-selling Indian-American author
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni to read at UCSB

Summary Facts:

UCSB Arts & Lectures presents acclaimed writer Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni reading from her work on Monday, February 4 at 4 pm in UCSB Hatlen Theater. Divakaruni is the author of four volumes of poetry, three novels, including the recently published The Vine of Desire (Doubleday), and two collections of short stories, including the American book Award-winner Arranged Marriage. Divakaruni’s writing explores issues such as identity, loyalty, independence and tradition, all set into relief by the context of the immigrant experience. “Her literary voice,” declared USA Today, “is a sensual bridge between worlds. India and America. Children and parents. Men and women. Passion and pragmatism.”

Born in Calcutta, Divakaruni came to the United States to continue her studies, earning an M.A. from Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio and a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, both in English. She turned to writing as a way to explore what it meant to be an immigrant woman in the United States. Inspired by Mahasweta Devi, a pioneering Indian feminist writer, and by Maxine Hong Kingston and her book The Woman Warrior, which suggested immigrant stories could be given a voice, she began publishing stories and poems in journals like The New Yorker, Ms., The Atlantic Monthly and Threepenny Review. In 1996 the publication of her first short story collection, Arranged Marriage, won her an American Book Award and established her reputation as an evocative chronicler of gender and culture clashes.

Her latest novel, The Vine of Desire, reunites the protagonists of her earlier best seller Sister of My Heart. Anju and Sudha meet in the United States and rekindle the friendship from their youthful days in Calcutta, having to struggle with broken hearts, broken marriages and an American culture that views them as outsiders. The book is one more example of her writing that led the Los Angeles Times to insist her work is “powerful...beautifully observed...She arranges bouquets of sensual detail and crisply etches unspoken passions.”

In addition to writing, since 1991 Divakaruni has been president of MAITRI, a South Aisan women’s hotline service in the San Francisco Bay area that particularly helps victims of domestic violence. She has taught at both Foothill College in Los Altos Hills, California and in the creative writing program at the University of Houston.

This reading by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni is presented by UCSB Arts & Lectures, the MultiCultural Center, Women’s Studies Program and the UCSB Women’s Center. Courtesy of the UCSB Bookstore, books by Divakaruni will be available for purchase and signing at the event.

For tickets or more information,
call UCSB Arts & Lectures at (805) 893-3535.

Editor: For photos, please call
George Yatchisin at (805) 893-3494.

©2002 UCSB Arts & Lectures, University of California, Santa Barbara