Vijay Seshadri is an American poet, essayist, and literary critic. He is the first Asian American to win the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
Wiki/Biography
Vijay Seshadri was born on Saturday, February 13, 1954, in Bangalore, India (age 69; as of 2023). His zodiac sign is Aquarius. When he was 5 years old, he moved with his family to Columbus, Ohio. His parents wanted him to become a mathematician. He began studying mathematics in college, then turned to philosophy and pursued a BA at Oberlin College and later a MA at Columbia University. He enrolled in a doctoral program in Middle Eastern studies and traveled to Pakistan to study Urdu and Farsi; but he never completed his Ph.D., and he was supposed to stay in Pakistan for a year but returned to the United States within four months. While in Pakistan, he realized that he wanted to be a poet rather than an academic.
appearance
Hair color: gray
Eye color: black
family
Vijay Seshadri was born in Bangalore to a Tamil-Kannada-speaking family who later immigrated to the United States.
Parents and siblings
Vijay’s father is a teacher at Ohio State University. There is not much information about his parents.
Vijay Seshadri’s childhood photos with his parents
wife and children
His wife, Suzanne Khuri, is a theater artist and learning specialist for children with mild disabilities and autism. They have one son, Nicholas.
Religion/Religious Views
Vijay is an atheist and while talking about his religion and naming his God in an interview, he said,
I was raised by a scientist. My father is a chemist. I mean, the purity of the people who raised me transcended religion. If I were religious, I would probably embrace something that is pantheistic in nature, but with strong Christian elements. Because I grew up in a Christian context for so long, it felt natural to me to frame the narrative in this way. But actually no religion is like that. ”
sign
Profession
literature
Vijay began writing poetry at the age of 16 and began writing his debut novel at the age of 20. While writing the novel, he stopped writing poetry. After the publication of his debut novel, it did not gain much popularity. According to Vijay, the failure of the book made him return to poetry. In 1985, he published his first poem in The Threepenny Review. Six years later, in 1996, at the age of 42, he published his first book of poetry while working as a copy editor at The New Yorker. September 11 attacks. “Missing” was written to represent Seshadri’s memory of the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the 35th President of the United States. Alice Quinn, poetry editor of The New Yorker, praised the poem and said:
A quintessentially American family and scene are conjured with poignant poignancy… The combination of epic sweeping sweeps (including allusions to one of Emily Dickinson’s 1862 Civil War masterpieces) and sharp, evocative detail is Seshadri versus the American canon. “
Vijay Seshadri recites his poetry as part of the Backroads Reading series at Brownington Congregational Church in Vermont.
Vijay is the author of many poems, including “Wild Kingdom” (1996), “That Was Now, This Was Then” (2020), “The Long Meadow” and “Gone.” After seven years as editor of The New York Times, Vijay resigned from his job and began working as a professor at Sarah Lawrence College, teaching courses such as “Nonfiction Writing” and “Form and Emotion in Nonfiction Prose.” “, “Rational and Irrational Narratives”, “Narrative Persuasion”. Seshadari’s poems, including “Rereading” (2012), “Visiting Paris” (2010) and “Thoughts on Questions” (2009), have been published in The New York Times. He is the first South Asian poetry editor of The Paris Review. He has received fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation.
Vijay Seshadri has participated in many literary events, including the Jaipur Literature Festival and the Tata Literary Festival, Mumbai.
Vijay Seshadri attends Jaipur Literature Festival
Vijay Seshadri attends Tata Literary Festival in Mumbai
other works
After college, Vijay didn’t know what to do with his life and, inspired by the counterculture happening in America, he decided to get involved. In 1974, he was driving a truck for an Oakland wholesale book company that supplied all college bookstores in the Bay Area, Peninsula and Valley. He worked for a full year, then decided to hitchhike to the San Francisco Bay Area, where he stayed until 1977, working as a bicycle messenger and starting a floor-refinishing business. In 1977 he moved to Newport and worked in the fishing industry. He stayed there for five years, during which time he wrote a novel. In 1982, he moved to New York to become a writer.
Vijay Seshadri’s Counterculture Period
Awards and Honors
- In 2014, he won the Pulitzer Prize for “Three Poems.”
Vijay Seshadri wins Columbia University President’s 2014 Poetry Award
- His poem “The Long Meadow” (2003) won the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets.
- He received the Paris Review’s Bernard F. Connors Prize for Long Poetry.
- In 2004, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Favorites
Facts/Trivia
- At the age of 16, he skipped two grades and began writing poetry.
- Vijay said in an interview about writing poetry,
Everyone can write poetry. Everyone is poetic. It’s a romantic idea, isn’t it? Romantic stuff is also revolutionary. “
- As a teenager, Vijay Seshadri chose religion as one of his high school subjects and talked about its impact on him, saying,
Reading Indian mythology gave me a taste of imagination and fantasy. Indian stories are so imaginative and so wild. Just like the story in Bhagavan Purana. I’ve always been interested in imaginative things, even for writers. Like Flaubert’s God, Eliot is omnipresent in his work without being obvious. “
- In an interview, Vijay described his favorite poet TS Eliot as a character in a Henry James story, saying:
Like a character in a Henry James story who has one foot in America and one in Europe, and a fat brain that lives in places that cannot be mapped. “
Vijay Seshadri interviewed at his home in Brooklyn
Categories: Biography
Source: HIS Education