Beena Kamlani

Beena Kamlani is a Pushcart Prize-winning fiction writer whose work has appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review, Ploughshares, Identity Lessons: Learning to Be American, eds. Gillan (1999), Growing Up Ethnic in America, eds. Gillan (1999), The Lifted Brow (2008), World Literature Today and other publications. She received the Yeovil Fiction Award (Somerset, England), for a novel in progress in 2017. She has been awarded fellowships at Yaddo, MacDowell, Ledig House/Writers Omi, Hawthornden Castle, Jentel Arts, and Hedgebrook. In her years as senior editor at Viking Penguin, she worked closely with literary luminaries like Saul Bellow and Robert Fagles; bestselling writers like Kim Edwards, Terry McMillan, Jacqueline Mitchard, and Natalie Baszile; literary fiction writers like Ruth Ozeki and Paul Beatty; biographers like Diane Middlebrook and Blanche Wiesen Cook; and translations of works by Jiang Rong, Mo Yan, and Reinaldo Arenas. She taught book editing at New York University for nearly two decades and earned an award for teaching excellence. Her first novel, The English Problem, was published in January 2025.