Maya Shanbhag Lang is the author of What We Carry, named a New York Times Editors’ Choice and a “Best Memoir of 2020” by Amazon, Bookshop.Org, “Good Morning America,” PopSugar, Platform Magazine, Bustle, and others. She is also the author of The Sixteenth of June, a modern reinterpretation of James Joyce’s Ulysses that was long listed for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and named a must-read novel by CBS and InStyle.
Lang’s essays have appeared in places such as New York Magazine, Goop, The Washington Post, and Times of India. Winner of the Neil Shepard Prize in Fiction, in 2020, she was named a “Woman You Should Know” by the American Civil Rights Museum.
After graduating magna cum laude from Swarthmore College, Lang earned her M.A. from NYU and Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Stony Brook University. Her dissertation, “The Hypochondriac: Bodies in Protest from Herman Melville to Toni Morrison” won the Weisinger Award for outstanding doctoral achievement.
A passionate author advocate, Lang formerly served as President of the Authors Guild. The daughter of Indian immigrants and the proud parent of a non-binary teenager, she currently lives in Sleepy Hollow, New York.