I was born to South Asian immigrant artists and raised in the American West.

 

Through my writing, I return again and again to what feels inexhaustible: the ecosystems that bind us, the slow ache of immigrant sorrow, the ordinary faces of cruelty, the layered, bewildering textures of Muslim girlhood. I write about sex and hunger, about the beloved and the body, about what it means to call yourself happy—or sad—in a world where those categories collapse so easily. I think about grief, not as a singular monolith but as a chorus, polyphonic and contradictory. I write about cooking as devotion, about burning as apprenticeship, about myths, those inherited and those we forge in secret—about the stories we tell ourselves of where we come from and why. And always, circling back: God. I suspect most thought is a kind of thinking toward God, however oblique.

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You can find my work here

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​I live in a quiet, mostly uneventful stretch of the American West, where the most arresting interruption to a Costco run is the sudden gaze of cows.

 

I share this life with my husband, Dr. John C. Dulin, who is both my anchor and my astonishment.

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Thank you for being here.  And anywhere. 

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​​​With love,
Jaia

xx