Bio


Writer of poetry, literary nonfiction, speculative fiction, and articles


Coach for writers and their untold stories


Consultant on diversity, media, social media, and corporate communications


Short Bios

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65 WORDS

Minal Hajratwala (they/she) is the founder of the Unicorn Authors Club and co-founder of the Changemaker Authors Cohort, supporting movement leaders and activists to develop narrative-changing books. Her books include Leaving India: My Family’s Journey from Five Villages to Five Continents (winner of four nonfiction awards), Bountiful Instructions for Enlightenment (poetry), Moon Fiji (travel guidebook), and Out! Stories from the New Queer India (anthology). 

130 WORDS

Minal Hajratwala (they/she) is the founder of the Unicorn Authors Club and co-founder of the Changemaker Authors Cohort, supporting movement leaders and activists to develop narrative-changing books. She wrote the award-winning epic Leaving India: My Family’s Journey from Five Villages to Five Continents, called “incomparable” by Alice Walker and “searingly honest” by the Washington Post; Bountiful Instructions for Enlightenment (poetry); and the Moon Fiji travel guidebook. She edited Out! Stories from the New Queer India (2013) and co-founded The (Great) Indian Poetry Collective. She graduated from Stanford, was a fellow at Columbia, was a Fulbright-Nehru Senior Scholar, and attended the Clarion West workshop in 2019. Her Granta essay “A Brief Guide to Gender in India” was named one of the 10 best pieces of writing on the web for 2015. 

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Minal Hajratwala (they/she) is…

a unicorn of many colors, and a poet at heart. She is the founder of the Unicorn Authors Club and co-founder of the Changemaker Authors Cohort, supporting movement leaders and activists to develop narrative-changing books.

Minal has been coaching authors since the 2009 publication of their first book, Leaving India: My Family’s Journey From Five Villages to Five Continents, which was called “incomparable” by Alice Walker and “searingly honest” by the Washington Post. It won a Pen USA Award, an Asian American Writers Workshop Award, a Lambda Literary Award, and a California Book Award.

Her latest book is a travel guidebook, Moon Fiji (2019), which highlights ecologically and culturally sustainable tourism options in the country where her ancestors settled in 1909. 

Her poetry collection, Bountiful Instructions for Enlightenment (2013), includes poems and the script for her theatrical poetry extravaganza, “Avatars: Gods for a New Millennium,” which was commissioned by the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco for World AIDS Day. 

In 2010-11, Minal spent a year as a Fulbright-Nehru Senior Scholar in Mumbai, then moved to Bangalore for six years. While in India, they edited a groundbreaking anthology, Out! Stories from the New Queer India, and co-founded a poetry press, The (Great) Indian Poetry Collective, which published nine books by emerging poets under a collective mentorship model.

As a journalist, Minal was most recently an editor-at-large at Zócalo Public Square during the first year of the pandemic. She started her career as an intern reporter-researcher at TIME magazine. In the 1990s, she ran the Sunday Perspective section of the San Jose Mercury News.

A turning point came in 2000, when Minal was awarded a yearlong National Arts Journalism Program fellowship at Columbia University. She enjoyed a practicum with Jessica Hagedorn’s Dogeaters production at The Public Theater, and she took the j-school’s renowned Book Seminar, where she wrote a proposal that resulted in a six-figure book contract with a major publisher.

Minal spent seven years researching and writing the book that became Leaving India, traveling the world to interview more than 75 members of her extended family. The writing was often difficult, and in hindsight, those seven years were an intensive study of craft, writer’s block, internalized oppression, and how to develop one’s own supportive writing community. Since publishing Leaving India to critical acclaim, Minal has turned their knowledge and editorial expertise toward supporting other writers as a coach and teacher.

Their creative work has received recognition and support from the Sundance Institute, Jon Sims Center for the Arts, SerpentSource Foundation, Djerassi Resident Artists Program, Pond Farm Artist Residency, Millay Colony, Mesa Refuge, Blue Mountain Center, Clarion West, and the Hedgebrook Women Authoring Change residency program, where they serve on the Board of Directors. 

She is a graduate of Stanford University.