Hi, I’m Kanak! I was born in Bombay (now known as Mumbai) and my family moved to Dubai when I was about six. My parents relocated again when I was a sophomore in high school to Los Angeles, where I was lucky enough to stay for the next six years.
It was a miracle to get into USC (I was a bad student in high school), and it was even more of a miracle—not to enforce the stereotype—that my Indian parents let me major in English (without a business minor). Writing had been a major part of my life for most of my life—I have bookshelves full of old journals, in which I would copy out lines from my favorite books, a sort of longhand printing. So really, there wasn’t a reality I could see for myself where literature wasn’t involved. This is all to say that I am endlessly grateful that I could pursue by love for literature at USC, where I felt giddy and lucky each year.
Looking back, each of my English classes felt to me like a miracle. I remember walking into Meg Russett’s 262 class on British literature as a freshman and feeling that rush of hearing someone else describe a feeling that I could never name. Dr. Russett described how life was made much more bearable by humans’ ability to be at two places at once (we were discussing Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey”). And as a sophomore, I felt encouraged and thrilled to write poetry for the first time in Molly Bendall’s workshop, which was an environment I still crave today when I write something new. And of course, my fiction workshops which always felt more like social hour than class: I adopted a sense openness from Aimee Bender with her extreme generosity and the importance of character in Danzy Senna’s Advanced Fiction (I remember her asking once, why my story started where it did, and stuttering out a nonsensical, improvised answer). I recently completed my honors thesis under the guidance of Meg Russett and Maggie Nelson, both intimidatingly brilliant and inspiring advisors.
After graduation, I plan to catch up on all the books I never had time to read in college. Pride and Prejudice is on this list. I hope to apply to graduate school for another English degree someday soon.
