Office Hours

Wednesdays in-person from 3:15 – 5:00 pm, and via Zoom by prior appointment on Tuesdays and Thursdays between 3:00 pm – 4:00 pm. Email for Zoom link. 

Get to know Zara

Zara Chowdhary is a multilingual writer of fiction and nonfiction, and dabbles with translation in Hindi and Urdu. She has an MA (Writing for Performance) from the University of Leeds and an MFA (Creative Writing and Environment) from Iowa State University. She has previously worked as a copywriter and held several jobs across movie sets and as part of writer's rooms in major Bollywood studios. In the US, she has produced documentary television and podcasts for Turner Classic Movies.

Her debut memoir, The Lucky Ones (Crown/Penguin Random House, 2024) was a PEN America finalist, in addition to being listed #4 on TIME Magazine's top ten nonfiction books of the year, and recognized in lists by Electric Literature, NPR, Esquire, People magazine, and the Atlantic amongst others. Her screenwriting work for National Geographic India has won her an Asian Television award, and several of her environmental documentary projects on endangered species and human-animal conflict across South Asia have been nominated at film festivals across the globe.  

She has previously taught Hindi and South Asian culture at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and helped develop materials for a culture learning app as part of a flagship initiative by UW Madison and the Institute for International Education. She has also taught at the Tin House Summer Workshop, and written for literary magazines like Wasafiri, Acacia, Flyway, amongst others.  

Her current research interests include environmental science fiction and speculative literature from the subcontinent, and studying shifts in SA postcolonial lives through fine art, music, street culture, protest theatre, social media, and popular cinema.