Mani Rao
Mani Rao (born 28 February 1965) is an Indian poet and translator, writing in English.
Author of eight poetry collections, a translation of Kalidasa's works and a translation of the Bhagavad Gita as a poem, Rao has had poems published in literary journals including Fulcrum, Wasafiri, Meanjin, Washington Square, West Coast Line, Tinfish, and in anthologies including Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia, and Beyond (W.W. Norton, 2008), The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets. (Bloodaxe Books, 2008) and The Dance of the Peacock.
She was a Visiting Fellow at the Iowa International Writing Program in 2005 and 2009, and held the 2006 University of Iowa International Programs writer-in-residence fellowship.She completed MFA from university of nevada Las vegas. She was a co-founder of OutLoud, a regular poetry-reading gathering, in Hong Kong, and contributed a poetry segment to RTHK Radio 4.
Translations of Rao's poems have been published in Latin, Italian, Korean, Chinese, Arabic, French and German. She has performed at literary festivals in Hong Kong, Singapore, Melbourne, Vancouver, Chicago, and at the 2006 New York PEN World Voices.
Rao worked in advertising and television from 1985 to 2004, and was the Senior Vice-President, Marketing and Corporate Communications at Star (TV) Group Ltd., based in Hong Kong. She was born in India and moved to Hong Kong in 1993. She has an MFA from the University of Nevada-Las Vegas. and has a PhD in religious studies from Duke University.
Books
Listing in The Oxford Companion to Modern Poetry, (Eds. Ian Hamilton & Jeremy Noel-Tod. Oxford University Press, 2013. 2nd Edition):
"Mani Rao (1965— ) Born in India, Rao moved to Hong Kong in 1993, where she published six of her eight books of poetry. More recently she has pursued doctoral studies in Sanskrit and Religion while dividing her time between the USA and India. Neither personal biography nor geopolitical location are prominent in her poems, which are almost all short, no more than a page. She often works in frequently end-stopped, staccato lines of variable length, with a line not necessarily connecting to its predecessor, and with unstable pronouns and gender ambiguity confounding any notion of a discrete, confessional self—although there are traces of narrative. Among the early collections, The Last Beach (Asia 2000, 1999), is perhaps the strongest. Echolocation (Chameleon Press, 2003), which appears to recollect a love affair echoed against the sound of the sea and the radio, switches visually to prose, with each isolated sentence also becoming the measure of the line. 100 Poems, 1985–2005 (Chameleon, 2006) excerpts from six previous books. Ghostmasters (Chameleon, 2010) ramps up her linguistic playfulness. Rao's version of the Bhagavad Gita (Autumn Hill / Penguin, 2010 / 2011) unpacks the original Sanskrit with a range of avant garde techniques—with regards to prosody, diction, mise-en-page and lineation—rendering a new translation of the well-known philosophical text unlike any before it. Her most recent poetry continues her erotic themes but makes more explicit reference to stories and characters drawn from Indian and Western classical sources."
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Wikipedia