Work

Teaching

Neela Vaswani is on faculty at Spalding University’s brief-residency MFA in Writing Program. She founded and curated the Adult Literacy and ESL Storylines Project at the New York Public Library.

Neela has been Visiting-Writer-in-Residence or Guest Lecturer at over 100 institutions, including: 

Manhattanville College; Knox College; 92nd Street Y (Tribeca); University of California, Santa Barbara; University of Wyoming; SALTAF (South Asian Literary and Theatre Arts Festival) at the Smithsonian Institute; Whitney Museum of Art; IIIT Hyderabad, India; Ethical Culture Fieldston School; SUNY Oswego; Beverly Hills Public Library; Skidmore College; Jimenez-Porter House, University of Maryland; Kentucky Women Writers Conference; Asian American Writer’s Workshop, NYC; BEA; Zora Neale Hurston Series at Simmons College; ALA; Friends School (Baltimore); Cedar Crest College; New York Historical Society; Middle State Tennessee University; the Dalton School, NYC; DeSales University; The Carnegie Center; Georgia College; SIDH (Society for Integrated Development of the Himalayas), Kempty, India; Symphony Space, NYC; Enoch Pratt Free Library, Baltimore; Morehead University; ABA; The Center for Fiction, NYC; Indiana University; The Caedmon School, NYC; Brown School, Louisville; Harvard Extension; CUNY Graduate Center; University of Rhode Island; Marblehead Highschool, MA; Vermont College MFA in Writing Program; Brearley School for Girls, NYC; University of Houston; AWP; Western Kentucky University; Allen-Stevenson School, NYC, Alice Deal Middle School, Washington D.C., Wayne County Library, PA; University of California, Davis; M. Jerry Weiss Center at New Jersey City University; the Queens Museum of Art, The Town School NYC; Charlotte Country Day School; St. Michael's College, etc. etc.

Specialties

Creative Writing:

Fiction (short stories, novel, novella); Creative Nonfiction (essay, memoir); Writing-for-Children (middle-grade, young adult); Mixed-genre; Collaboration.

Scholarly:

Cultural Studies and/or American Studies (emphasis on race/ethnicity, gender, class, sexuality, religion, illness/the body, and region); American Literature; South Asian Literature (global); Anthropology (Ethnography); Literacy (Adult Literacy and ESL).