Leeya Mehta is a prize-winning poet, fiction writer and essayist. She is widely published across the world, including in the Times of India, Poetry London, The Atlanta Review, and the Beloit Poetry Journal. Her poetry collections are The Towers of Silence and A Story of the World Before the Fence, a finalist for the Rumi Prize for Poetry. Her work is anthologised in America s Future, Furious Gravity, District Lines, the Penguin Book of Modern Indian Poets and in Future Work, an anthology of contemporary Indian writers from Red Hen Press. Her popular column on the reading and writing life was The Company We Keep. Mehta grew up in Mumbai and graduated from St Xavier s College. She has a Master s degree from Oxford University, where she was a Radhakrishnan Scholar. After a UN University fellowship in Tokyo, she received a Master s from Georgetown University and worked at the World Bank. She is currently the Director of the Alan Cheuse International Writers Center in America s capital region, and is an award-winning professor and curator at George Mason University. She lives in Washington DC with her husband and daughters.