Vijay Seshadri
| Vijay Seshadri | |
|---|---|
 |
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| Born |
February 13, 1954 Bangalore, India |
| Genre | Poetry |
| Notable awards | Pulitzer Prize for Poetry |
Vijay Seshadri (born February 13, 1954 in Bangalore, India) is a Brooklyn, New York–based Pulitzer Prize–winning poet, essayist, and literary critic.
Vijay won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for poetry, for 3 Sections.
Vijay moved to the United States at the age of five. He grew up in Columbus, Ohio, where his father taught chemistry at Ohio State University.
Seshadri has been an editor at The New Yorker, as well as an essayist and book reviewer in The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, The Threepenny Review, The American Scholar, and various literary quarterlies. He has received grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts, National Endowment for the Arts, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation; and area studies fellowships from Columbia University. As a professor and chair in the undergraduate writing and MFA program at Sarah Lawrence College he has taught courses on 'Non-Fiction Writing', 'Form and Feeling in Nonfiction Prose', 'Rational and Irrational Narrative', and 'Narrative Persuasion'.
Seshadri's poem The Disappearances deals with a "cataclysm" in "American history" and the baffling nature of loss. It came to prominence after the New Yorker published it on their back cover following the September 11 attacks in 2001. It was also subsequently included in The Best American Poetry 2003. Seshadri had intended for The Disappearances to personalise loss having described himself as initially too shocked to write poetry in the wake of the attacks. The New Yorker's poetry editor, Alice Quinn, said that the poem "...summoned up, with acute poignance, a typical American household and scene...The combination of epic sweep (including the quoted allusion to one of Emily Dickinson's Civil War masterpieces, from 1862) and piercing, evocative detail is characteristic of the contribution Seshadri has made to the American canon."
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