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

Nishi Chawla is an acclaimed writer and retired academician whose work spans poetry, drama, fiction, 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 completed a two-year postdoctoral fellowship at Johns Hopkins University. After nearly two decades as a tenured Professor of English at Delhi University, she relocated to the United States, teaching at the University of Maryland and later retiring from Thomas Edison State University in New Jersey.

Dr. Chawla is only the third Indian poet to be featured on the Library of Congress–sponsored 'Poet and Poem' program. 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. Her forthcoming short-story collection, Refugee-ing / Skinning, will be published in 2026.