Ravi Shankar
Poet in Providence, Rhode Island
Ravi Shankar is an award-winning Indian American poet. Born in Virginia, Ravi was raised only speaking the Tamil language of South Asia and spent several formative years of his childhood living in India; his multicultural and international upbringing has shaped his work as a poet, for much of his writing explores ideas of identity as well as interactions between and within different cultures. Through his poems, Ravi hopes to improve the stale and monodimensional portrayals of Middle Eastern and Asian cultures in Western literature and art.
He has published or edited ten books and chapbooks of poetry, and his poems have been highlighted in the New York Times, Gwarlingo, Contemporary Poetry Review, and dozens of other publications. Ravi Shankar has won a Pushcart Prize, the 2010 National Poetry Review Prize for his collection Deepening Groove, and other accolades.
After earning a degree from BA from the University of Virginia and an MFA from Columbia University, Ravi Shankar entered academia, He currently teaches for the New York Writers Workshop, where he enjoys the opportunity to blend his own egalitarian philosophy toward education and help writers of all levels and ages to grow. Previously, he taught at Central Connecticut State University, and he was a faculty member for the first international MFA program at City University of Hong Kong.
In 1999, Ravi Shankar co-founded Drunken Boat, an electronic journal of literature and the arts that is now one of the oldest digital publications of its kind. Drunken Boat offers a forum for art that pushes boundaries and challenges established norms as well as providing a space to celebrate the work of traditionally underrepresented artists: women, racial or ethnic minorities, people of color, queer, differently-abled, and gender nonconforming artists. Today, Ravi is a member of Drunken Boat’s Board of Directors, but in the past he served as the Editor-in-Chief and Executive Director of the journal for 15 years.
Ravi Shankar currently lives in Providence, Rhode Island.