a few words
Meera Subramanian
I am a narrative nonfiction writer whose work has been published in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Virginia Quarterly Review, USA Today, Smithsonian, Orion, Audubon, Salon, Bidoun, Discover, Grist, and others. Internationally, I’ve written for India Today and GEO (India), Africa Geographic (South Africa), Revue Urbanisme (France), and others.
Since 2007, I have also been an editor of Killing the Buddha, an award-winning online literary magazine filled with stories about belief, lost or found, sometimes both. Believer, Beware: First-Person Dispatches from the Margins of Faith (Beacon Press, July 2009), an anthology featuring the best of Killing the Buddha, includes my piece “Banana Slug Psalm.” Another piece from Killing the Buddha, “A Hundred Unspoken Rules,” was just published in The Best Women’s Travel Writing 2011 by Travelers’ Tales.
Each summer, I teach environmental journalism as part of a Conservation Media class in Kenya for St. Lawrence University undergraduates. Visit the blog covering the class here.
When pressed to make up a lie about myself, I said I was descended from Romanian gypsies. In truth, my great-great grandfather, on my mother’s side, arrived in Texas from Germany and helped make the first map of the Lone Star state in 1879. And my father was the first in his family to leave India, disembarking his ship in New York harbor inn 1959. So movement beyond native boundaries runs through my blood. Home has been New Jersey, New Orleans, a ship, a southern music town.
Home has been multiple places in the Pacific Northwest, where I spent more than a decade working with environmental nonprofit organizations, some in the city, and some at the end of a dirt road. Give me big fat trees heavy with lichen, naked bodies in emerald swimming holes, home-grown food and home-brewed cider.
Or gusts of wind atop the Brooklyn Bridge, Prospect Park when the leaves are changing, steamy soup dumplings in Chinatown and a Guinness poured by John at the 11th Street Bar.
Then there was a good long stint in New York City, where I earned a master’s in journalism from NYU in Cultural Reporting and Criticism.
I now find myself on the shores of Cape Cod, again at the end of a dirt road.
Straddling the mental divide between urban and rural, I seek out stories of the wild world hidden within the cityscape and ourselves, writing about everything from the return of peregrine falcons to the near extinction of vultures, from arranged marriages in India to organic chocolate in Grenada to land conservation (for the Open Space Institute) across the East Coast. I have spent extensive time, but never quite enough, exploring countries around the world, including multiple visits to see family in India, where my conversationally fluent Spanish isn’t much help.
Residencies & Fellowships:
Society of Environmental Journalists 20-20-20 Fellowship — October 2010
Blue Mountain Center — October 2009
Mesa Refuge — September 2007
Institutes for Journalism and Natural Resources (Blue Mountains) — May 2006
Associations:
Society of Environmental Journalists
South Asian Journalists Association