SHORT BIO (LITERARY)

Sujatha Fernandes is an Indian-American-Australian writer, originally from Mangalore in South India. She is author of a memoir on a global hip hop life Close to the Edge (Verso), a collection of essays The Cuban Hustle (Duke University Press), and a children’s book Don’t Throw my Teeth on the Roof. Her short stories have appeared in New Ohio Review, Saranac Review, The Maine Review, and Aster(ix). Her essays have been published in the New York Times, The Nation, Orion Magazine and elsewhere. She received a fellowship from the ‘21 Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and is an alumna of the Tin House Winter Workshop ‘22. Her fiction and essays have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. She is completing a collection of short stories Shadow People, and a novel Beyond the Monsoon Mountains. She is represented by Maria Cardona at Aevitas Creative Management.

SHORT BIO (ACADEMIC)

Sujatha Fernandes is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Sydney, and an Adjunct Professor of Sociology at the City University of New York. Her work explores social and labor movements, participatory media and art, global Black cultures, migrant workers, and climate storytelling. Her publications include Cuba Represent! (Duke University Press), Who Can Stop the Drums? (Duke University Press), and Curated Stories (Oxford University Press), as well as articles in the New York Times, The Nation, and elsewhere. She has received several distinguished fellowships, including a Discovery Project grant from the Australia Research Council, and a Wilson-Cotsen Fellowship from Princeton University’s Society of Fellows.

LONG BIO

Sujatha Fernandes is a storyteller, writer, scholar, and teacher. She is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Sydney, and an Adjunct Professor of Sociology at the City University of New York. Her academic, activist, and literary work explores social and labor movements, participatory media and art, global Black cultures, migrant workers, and climate storytelling. She has done ethnographic work among marginalized barrio communities in Cuba and Venezuela, and migrant workers in New York City, Mumbai, and Sydney. Her writings are concerned with the stories of those erased by history, multi-racial working class solidarities, colonialism, neoliberalism, and socialist alternatives.

She is the author of five books. She has written two monographs: Cuba Represent! Cuban Arts, State Power, and the Making of New Revolutionary Cultures (Duke University Press, 2006) and Who Can Stop the Drums? Urban Social Movements in Chávez’s Venezuela (Duke University Press, 2010), which was reprinted in Spanish by Editorial Imago Mundi. Her travel memoir, Close to the Edge: In Search of the Global Hip Hop Generation (Verso, 2011) was reprinted in Australian and Chinese editions. In 2017, her book Curated Stories: The Uses and Misuses of Storytelling was published by Oxford University Press as part of the Oxford Studies in Culture and Politics. Her most recent book is a collection of essays entitled, The Cuban Hustle: Culture, Politics, Everyday Life (Duke University Press, 2020).

Fernandes has published articles in many edited volumes and journals, including Signs, Contexts, Latin American Politics & Society, Ethnography, and Anthropological Quarterly. She is an editorial board member of the literary magazine Transition: The Magazine of Africa and the Diaspora and edited a special issue with Jared Thomas on Bla(c)kness in Australia. She is on the advisory board of a series on Race, Labor Migration, and the Law at the University of California Press.

She is currently completing a collection of interlinked short stories about migrant workers in New York City entitled Shadow People. She is also completing a novel about Goan migrants in coastal Karnataka during the colonial wars of the eighteenth century.

She has been awarded several distinguished fellowships, including a three year Discovery Project grant from the Australia Research Council, a three year Wilson-Cotsen Fellowship from the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts at Princeton University and a Distinguished CUNY Fellowship at the Advanced Research Collaborative (ARC) at the CUNY Graduate Center. In 2008, she was awarded the Felix Gross Award from the CUNY Academy for Arts and Sciences in recognition of outstanding research. Fernandes has also received fellowships from the Mellon Foundation and the SSRC. Her work has been reprinted in Spanish, Portuguese, German, French, and Chinese.

Fernandes has a long-standing interest in political education. As a board member of the Brecht Forum in New York City, she helped to organize political education workshops and seminars. At the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics (CPCP) and together with the Center for the Humanities at the CUNY Graduate Center, she convened several political education workshops to bring together scholars and labor organizers from Domestic Workers United (DWU), New York Taxi Workers Alliance (NYTWA), Damayan, and Haitian Women for Haitian Refugees (HWHR). She has a Youtube channel, where her videos on Marxist and critical social theory are available.

She is the founder of the Racial Justice and the Curriculum project at the University of Sydney, which seeks to foreground Indigenous knowledges and histories, and material relating to colonialism, race, and racism across the curriculum.

She has appeared widely in the media, on MSNBC, NPR, American Public Radio, ABC Australia and elsewhere. She has been featured in New York’s Daily News and was the subject of a radio documentary on ABC Australia. Her essays have been published in the New York Times, The Nation, Orion Magazine, and other places.

Fernandes is multi-local and a global citizen. She spent her early childhood in South India, was raised in a multi-racial working class community in Sydney, and lived most of her adult life in the United States. She has also lived in Cuba, Venezuela, and India, and has traveled in other parts of Latin America and Asia. She speaks multiple languages and holds three nationalities. Her sister Deepa Fernandes is a co-host on the NPR show Here & Now.

Fernandes was the first in her family to go to university. She received a BA Hons from the University of Sydney and a PhD in Political Science from the University of Chicago. She is a devoted practitioner of Iyengar Yoga. She currently lives with her family in Sydney, on unceded Gadigal lands, and travels between Sydney and New York City.