Dipika Mukherjee

Dipika Mukherjee is an award-winning author of fiction and poetry and a lecturer in the StoryStudio Chicago, and teaches at the Graham School at University of Chicago. Her book Shambala Junction won the UK's Virginia Prize for Fiction and her book Ode to Broken Things was shortlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize. Her poetry collections are Dialect of Distant Harbors, The Third Glass of Wine, and The Palimpsest of Exile. 

Her next collection of short stories is called Rules of Desire. Her essays have appeared in Newsweek, Los Angeles Review of Books, Hemispheres, Orion, Scroll, The Edge, and others. Her work is also included in The Best Small Fictions 2019. Her poetry has appeared in publications around the world, including RHINO, Post Colonial Text, World Literature Today, Asia Literary Review, Del Sol Review, and Chicago Quarterly Review.

Dialect of Distant Harbors was published by CavanKerry Press in October 2022 and won the Quill and Ink Award for Poetry in 2023; it was also shortlisted for a Chicago Review of Books (CHIRBy) Award. She is the recipient of a 2022 Esteemed Artist Award from the City of Chicago. She serves as the Literary Life Ambassador for the Chicago Poetry Center.

Mukherjee received her PhD in English (sociolinguistics) from Texas A&M University. Her scholarly work focuses on the intersections between national language policy and migrant groups in Malaysia. With Maya Khemlani David, she co-edited National Language Planning and Language Shifts in Malaysian Minority Communities: Speaking in Many Tongues. Dipika Mukherjee has taught language and linguistics in many places including China, India, the Netherlands, the United States, Malaysia and Singapore.