NISHI CHAWLA Novelist • Poet • Playwright • A voice across continents. A pen across genres.

Nishi Chawla is a writer and retired academician whose work spans fiction, poetry, drama, and independent cinema. She is the author of eight poetry collections, eleven plays, four feature-length art-house films, and three novels. She has also co-edited two landmark poetry anthologies - Singing in the Dark and Greening the Earth—published by Penguin Random House.

She holds a Ph.D. in English from George Washington University and had completed a two-year postdoctoral fellowship at the Johns Hopkins University in 2000. After nearly two decades as a tenured Professor of English at Delhi University, she relocated to the United States. She has taught for another two decades in USA, first at the University of Maryland and later at Thomas Edison State University, New Jersey.

“Dr. Nishi Chawla is the third Indian poet ever invited to the Library of Congress–sponsored The Poet and the Poem, and has now been invited twice by its host, poet Grace Cavalieri.”

As a playwright, she is among the few Indian dramatists to have multiple plays staged in Manhattan. Her production The Mahatma versus Gurudev premiered in June 2025 to strong reviews, and her other plays continue to be staged across the United States and India.

Her filmmaking includes four independent art-house films—Mixed Up, The Strange Case of Normalcy, TechNous, and The Peace Activists. The first three stream on Amazon Prime; the fourth is screened at museums, libraries, and universities worldwide.

Her latest novel, Silent Walls, Speaking Stones, was published in Fall 2025 in Wyoming, USA. Her short-story collection on refugees, Refugee-ing / Skinning, has just been published in Fall 2026 in Boston, USA.