SATA
ENTRY TYPE:
WORK TITLE: This Is My Eye
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1974
WEBSITE: http://www.neelavaswani.com/
CITY: New York
STATE: NY
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
LAST VOLUME: SATA 279
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born 1974, Port Jefferson, NY; married Holter Graham (an actor).
EDUCATION:Skidmore College, B.A., 1996; Vermont College, M.F.A.; University of Maryland, Ph.D.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, academic, activist. Spalding University, Louisville, KY, teaches brief resident MFA in Writing Program. Also education activist in the U.S. and India, frequent collaborator with multimedia performance groups based in New York, and founder of the Storylines Project with the New York Public Library. Previously worked various jobs, including photo booth attendant, waitress, telephone book deliverer, maid, stage, manager, secretary, prop girl for movies, ice cream truck driver, national disaster first responder for the Red Cross and Fema, and cattle round-up and barbed wire fencing worker.
AVOCATIONS:Knitting, playing the fiddle.
AWARDS:American Book Award; O. Henry Prize; ForeWord Gold Medal; Nautilus Book Award Gold Medal; (with Silas House) Children’s Choices selection, International Reading Association, Best Children’s Books selection, Bank Street College of Education, Evelyn Thurman Young Readers Books Award, E.B. White Read-Aloud Book Awards Honor Book selection, and South Asian Book Award Honor Book selection, all 2013, all for Same Sun Here; (with House) Audie Award, 2013, for audiobook narration of Same Sun Here; also Grammy Award, 2015, for narration of I Am Malala: How One Girl Stood Up for Education.
WRITINGS
Contributor of stories to periodicals, including Epoch, Shenandoah, and Prairie Schooner.
SIDELIGHTS
Neil Vaswani is a writer who works in various genres, from short stories and mixed-genre memory to a middle-grade novel and a picture book for young readers. In addition to writing, Vaswani is an educational activist both in the United States and India. Her first book, Where the Long Grass Bends: Stories, includes thirteen short stories primarily revolving around immigrants to the United States or their children. A Kirkus Reviews contributor noted the tales “play with the notions of culture and homeland from a variety of perspectives.” Her next book, You Have Given Me a Country, combines memoir, history, and fiction as Vaswani writes about her Irish-Catholic mother and Sinhi-Indian father as well as her own experiences growing up as a mixed-race child in America. “At the heart of all its pieces is the story of family, and how love can hold it together in the face of obstacles,” wrote Foreword Reviews online contributor Christine Canfield.
Vaswani is coauthor with novelist Silas House of the middle grade novel Same Sun Here. The two authors provide dual narrations, with House writing the voice of River, a Kentucky coal miner’s son, and Vaswani the voice of Meena, an Indian immigrant who lives with her parents in Chinatown in New York City. Despite the disparities in their lives, it turns out that Meena and River share a lot in common, from fathers who must work far away to beloved grandmothers and dogs. The two become pen pals. Through their letters, they form a fast freinsdhip as they not only discuss their everyday lives but also broader issues such as politics, prejudice, and religion. Noting that the duo still have problems by the end of the novel, a Kirkus Reviews contributor went on to note that “readers will feel confident that their friendship will get them through whatever lies ahead.”
Vaswani also provide the text and photographs for This Is My Eye: A New York Story. The picture book for young children is a fictional account of a young girl discussing her life in New York City. The story and photographs, taken by Viswani to mimic the protoganist’s experiences, reveal a young girl whose circumstances reflect Vaswani’s own young life in the city. An author’s note at the end of the book explains Vaswani’s creative process. A Kirkus Reviews contributor called This Is My Eye “an elegant and playful look at perspective, photography, and a familiar (to many) cityscape.” Mary Melaugh, writing for the Youth Services Book Review website, remarked: “The simple narrative makes this accessible to youngsters in preschool, but the sophisticated ideas it illustrates could extend its readership … [to] the elementary grades and even into middle school.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, March 1, 2012, Hazel Rochman, review of Same Sun Here, p. 90.
Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books, April, 2012, Hope Morrison, review of Same Sun Here, p. 402.
Kirkus Reviews, October 15, 2003, review of Where the Long Grass Bends: Stories, p. 1250; June 1, 2018, review of This Is My Eye: A New York Story.
Library Journal, November 15, 2003, Shirley N. Quan, review of Where the Long Grass Bends, p. 101.
Publishers Weekly, January 19, 2004, review of Where the Long Grass Bends, p. 56; December 19, 2011, review of Same Sun Here, p. 53.
School Library Journal, April, 2012, Lalitha Nataraj, review of Same Sun Here, p. 165.
Voice of Youth Advocates, April, 2012, Donna Miller, review of Same Sun Here, p. 56.
ONLINE
Foreword Reviews Online, https://www.forewordreviews.com/ (October 3, 2018), Christine Canfield, review of You Have Given Me Country.
Neela Vaswani website, http://www.neelavaswani.com (October 3, 2018).
Youth Services Book Review, https://ysbookreviews.wordpress.com/ (August 21, 2018), Mary Melaugh, review of This Is My Eye.
About
Neela Vaswani is the award-winning author of the short story collection, Where the Long Grass Bends; the mixed-genre memoir, You Have Given Me a Country; the middle-grade novel in letters, Same Sun Here (co-written with Silas House), and a forthcoming picture book, This is My Eye. She is the recipient of the American Book Award, a PEN/O.Henry Prize, the ForeWord Book of the Year Gold Medal, the Italo Calvino Prize for Emerging Writers, the Nautilus Book Award, and many other literary honors. She received a Grammy award for her narration of I Am Malala: How One Girl Stood Up for Education and Changed the World and an Audie Award for her narration of Same Sun Here.
Vaswani has a Ph.D. in American Cultural Studies and an MFA in Writing. She lives in New York City and teaches at Spalding University’s brief-residency MFA in Writing Program. She is an education activist in the U.S. and India, and a frequent collaborator with multimedia performance groups based in New York.
Bio for Kids and the Young at Heart
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Neela’s mother used to say, “You and a book, like a fish and water,” when she caught Neela reading during dinner (a tip for other Book-Reading-Bandits: covering a book with a napkin in your lap is not an effective way to hide it).
Neela’s ideal day includes dancing on the subway, eating pickles with family and friends, and sitting still in the middle of a forest with a good book and a pack of dogs and chimpanzees.
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She lives in New York City with her husband (who can talk nonstop and stand on his head for a very long time), and travels around teaching, writing, and feeling lucky to do what she loves.
Neela's father is Sindhi-Indian and her mother is Irish-Catholic. When Neela was a kid, her family did a lot of wandering. Outside of the U.S., her favorite countries to live in are: India, Ireland, Turkey, Spain, Mexico, Egypt, China, and Belgium.
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Vaswani has held a number of waitressing jobs, from chicken shacks to comedy clubs, and she paid off her school loans by waitressing at a fondue bar in NYC. Her first job was at a one-hour photo booth on Long Island. She has also dressed Armani models, delivered telephone books, worked cattle round-ups and barbed wire fencing, ripped tickets at a movie theatre, been a maid, a stage manager, a secretary, a prop girl for two independent movies, worked as a National Disaster First Responder for the Red Cross and FEMA, and driven an ice cream truck.
She is left-handed although she plays the fiddle and knits right-handed. She loves paleontology, the Indian railway system, female detectives on television, goats, bats, mules, bad-tempered camels, online Boggle, and her husband.
Vaswani, Neela: THIS IS MY EYE
Kirkus Reviews. (June 1, 2018):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Vaswani, Neela THIS IS MY EYE Candlewick (Children's Fiction) $16.99 8, 14 ISBN: 978-0-7636-7616-2
A fictional exploration of how a young girl of color might move through and capture her world with a camera.
"My dad says it's not what you look at--it's what you see." So begins a young girl's documenting of her life and surroundings in New York City. The blurred lights and background when she spins, the mirrors in puddles, the stories on walls, the shapes and patterns of everything, the "little things that grow in little spaces," and even the smile of an upside-down selfie. The city's sweeping landscapes juxtaposed with its small, pulsating minutiae pick up an easy momentum as the poetic text moves rhythmically from page to page. The energy and pace of the city is channeled to the impact of each photograph as they are strung together by the observational text. An author's note clarifies that the photographs are Vaswani's (Same Sun Here, with Silas House, 2013, etc.) work, taken to mimic the perspective of a fictional 9-year-old girl. While readers may be prompted to wonder how a photo series taken by an actual child photographer might have differed, Vaswani's debut picture book is an elegant and playful look at perspective, photography, and a familiar (to many) cityscape.
A captivating journey. (Picture book. 4-7)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Vaswani, Neela: THIS IS MY EYE." Kirkus Reviews, 1 June 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A540723326/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=f4ee7d47. Accessed 29 Aug. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A540723326
Thirteen stories by Indian-American Vaswani.
The experiences of immigrants (or of their children) who have come to America but not quite found their feet here provides much of Vaswani’s material in stories that play with the notions of culture and homeland from a variety of perspectives. The protagonist of “Bing-Chen,” for example, is a half-Chinese, half-American adolescent who ventures into Chinatown for a haircut and reflects on his own inability to feel truly at home in either white or Asian society. In “Domestication of an Imaginary Goat,” a young Indian woman in New York fantasizes with her American boyfriend about the home that she knows they will never have. Some of the tales are set abroad: The title story, for instance, is about the travails of a young orphaned girl living in a Catholic boarding school in India during an election riot, while “Sita and Mrs. Durber” follows a schoolteacher in India who tries to help a precocious but withdrawn girl. “Bolero” is the story of a boy who grows up on a farm during the Spanish Civil War and manages with some difficulty to emigrate to America, where he studies at Juilliard and goes on to become an orchestra conductor, while “Blue, Without Sorrow” offers a short family history from the perspective of a melancholy Mexican woman who recovered from a mortal illness as a girl and later moves to Arizona (after her father dies). There are also simpler stories that stand stylistically apart from the rest, like “The Rigors of Dance Lessons,” about a husband and wife who (in what becomes an apparent metaphor of their marriage) sign up for dance lessons.
A strange and not altogether satisfying mix: newcomer Vaswani takes up certain themes, but her work seems not to have found an overriding focus or coherence.
Pub Date: Jan. 1st, 2004
ISBN: 1-889330-96-5
Page count: 288pp
Publisher: Sarabande
Review Posted Online: May 20th, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15th, 2003
YOU HAVE GIVEN ME A COUNTRY
Neela Vaswani
Sarabande Books (Aug 26, 2010)
Softcover $15.95 (208pp)
978-1-932511-82-6
2010 INDIES Winner
Gold, Essays (Adult Nonfiction)
One day in school Vaswani’s teacher goes through a list of nationalities. The children are supposed to raise their hands when she names something that was part of their ancestry. Vaswani raises her hand for Pakistani, German, French, Irish, American Indian, Indian “from India,” Spanish, African, and Middle Eastern. She only keeps her hand down for Chinese and Portuguese. Her teacher glares at her when her hand goes up again for Greek. “Stop raising your hand,” she says. “You’re making a mockery of the American diversity lesson.”
Vaswani writes about how it feels to navigate through a world she never completely fits into due to her biracial status. The daughter of an Irish-Catholic mother and Sindhi-Indian father, she stands out in the white culture of America as too Indian and in India as not Indian enough. “I pledge allegiance to the in-between,” she declares.
Vaswani’s first book, Where the Long Grass Bends, is a collection of short stories. The lyrical prose style of that book is also evident in this one, a biography that she states is both “real, and imagined.” It is a love poem to her family in many ways, which shares the disparate histories of her parents’ families. Her tone is stoic when telling of her grandmother Julia’s thirteen-year battle with mouth cancer, and her style becomes almost epic as she describes her father’s family fleeing the horrific bloodshed that devoured their home state of Sindh after Partition.
Though her story is steeped in difference—Irish/Indian, Catholic/Hindi, brown/white—it is also embraces the similarities shared with those around her. She tells of the scientist in Egypt who pointed out the square jaw she and her mother share and of singing along to the Mool Mantra, a Sikh prayer, with her father. She describes the intense emotion she felt when filling out the 2000 US Census and, for the first time, being able to check more than one box for ethnicity, finally able to honor both sides of her family on the government form.
This book is part history, part memoir, and part social commentary. At the heart of all its pieces is the story of family, and how love can hold it together in the face of obstacles. “There is no such thing as too different,” Vaswani writes. “There is only an unwillingness to love enough.”
Reviewed by Christine Canfield
September / October 2010
Even better than reading a refreshingly honest story by one talented writer is reading one by two such writers. House (Eli the Good) and adult author Vaswani (Where the Long Grass Bends) alternate between the voices of Meena—a 12-year-old girl who lives with her recently immigrated Indian family in New York City—and River, who lives with his environmental activist grandmother in rural Kentucky. The two connect as pen pals, and their letters reveal the unusual intersections (like okra) and the stark contrasts in their lives. The preteens reflect on everything from prejudice and religion to politics and music, but their voices are so open, true, and even humorous that the story never feels heavy or preachy (“You are the best person I know,” River writes. “But I’m sorry, I still don’t like to talk about shaving your legs and all that. That is something we will have to agree to disagree on”). Meena and River don’t have all their troubles worked out by book’s end, but readers will feel confident that their friendship will get them through whatever lies ahead. Ages 9–up.
This Is My Eye: A New York Story – Pictures and Text by Neela Vaswani
Posted on August 21, 2018 by kyurenka
1 Vote
This Is My Eye: A New York Story – Pictures and Text by Neela Vaswani, Candlewick Press, (9780763676162), 2018.
Format: Hardcover
Rating: 1-5: (5 is an excellent or a Starred review) 5
What did you like about the book? Through the photos of a fictional nine-year-old girl narrator, Vaswani creatively introduces the idea of truly “seeing”, utilizing multiple points of view and perspectives of New York City. Intentionally mirroring her own life, she shows that the narrator’s family is biracial — Asian and African-American — a kind of family she states that she never saw in books when she was growing up. Vaswani also purposefully ensures that the city exists as a character itself by including a treasure trove of views of vibrant, diverse city life. The visual feast includes murals, statues, gardens, people, buildings and animals. Plentiful white space frames the photos. Short sentences make up the narrative, such as, “Shapes and patterns are everywhere.” Readers may be surprised to find out that the photos weren’t actually taken by the narrator, but the author does a great job explaining her creative process in a note at the end.
Anything you didn’t like about it? No.
To whom would you recommend this book? The simple narrative makes this accessible to youngsters in preschool, but the sophisticated ideas it illustrates could extend its readership up through the elementary grades and even into middle school picture book collections. It could be used as an intro to photography and/or a demonstration of point of view and perspective. Many of the photos could easily serve as writing prompts.
Who should buy this book? Elementary school libraries and classrooms, middle school picture book collections, public libraries.
Where would you shelve it? Shelve with photography books in 770, but book talk it to teachers and students to increase awareness.
Should we (librarians/readers) put this on the top of our “to read” piles? Yes!
Reviewer’s Name, Library (or school), City: Mary Melaugh, Marshall Middle School Library, Billerica, MA
Date of review: 8/21/18