About the Speakers

Amish is an Indian author, broadcaster, and former diplomat. With eleven books translated into twenty languages and over seven million copies sold, he is one of the fastest-selling writers in Indian publishing history. He hosts and produces award-winning documentaries for Jio and Warner Bros Discovery TV. He is also the co-founder of an AAA Video Game.

Pria Anand is a neurologist and the author of The Mind Electric: A Neurologist on the Strangeness and Wonder of Our Brains. A graduate of Yale University and Stanford Medical School, she is trained in neurology, neuro-infectious diseases, and neuroimmunology at the Johns Hopkins Hospital and the Massachusetts General Hospital. Anand is now an Assistant Professor of Neurology at the Boston University School of Medicine.

Chi Rainer Bornfree is the co-author of the epistolary memoir of the Covid-19 pandemic, The End Doesn’t Happen All at Once, along with Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan. Holding a PhD from UC Berkeley, they have taught at Bard, Princeton, and New York state prisons. They live in the Hudson Valley.

Sunjay R Devarajan is a pulmonary & critical care physician practicing at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas. His clinical and research expertise is in bronchiectasis, cystic fibrosis, mycobacterial diseases, and medical education. Outside of the workplace, he is an avid reader, musician, fitness enthusiast, and family man.

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni is an award-winning author of twenty-three books and her work has been translated into thirty languages. The Economic Times has included her in their list of ‘The 20 Most Influential Global Indian Women.’ Her novel, Independence, has won the American Book Award. Her newest book is a biography looking at the early part of Sudha and Narayan Murthy’s lives titled  An Uncommon Love. She teaches Creative Writing at the University of Houston.

Born and raised in Atlanta, Rob Franklin is a writer of fiction and poetry, and a cofounder of Art for Black Lives. A Kimbilio Fiction Fellow and finalist for the New England Review Emerging Writer Award, he has published work in New England Review, Prairie Schooner, and The Rumpus among others. Franklin lives in Brooklyn, New York, and teaches writing at the School of Visual Arts. Great Black Hope is his first novel.

Tayyba Kanwal is the author of the short story collection Talking With Boys forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press. She is a Pakistani-American writer, Senior Editor at Conjunctions., and Associate Fiction Editor at Cutleaf Journal. An absconded mathematician and technologist, a lover of lizards and morbid illustrations, she is Literary Director at Inprint. She holds an MFA from the University of Houston Creative Writing Program where she was an Inprint C. Glenn Cambor Fellow, and an MS in Mathematics from the University of Oregon.

Shekhar Kapur is a filmmaker, actor, TV presenter, and entrepreneur. He is best known for films such as Elizabeth the Golden Age, Bandit Queen, and Four Feathers, that have won or been nominated for numerous awards including the Oscars, BAFTAs, and Filmfare Awards. He was the executive producer of the Bollywood-themed Andrew Lloyd Webber musical Bombay Dreams and of films such as The Guru for Universal Studios. Kapur set up Virgin Comics and Virgin Animation, and he has been on the jury of many international film festivals. He is passionate about the current challenges of environmental sustainability and the role of tech-led storytelling to make an impact. He has been part of a number of boards and advisory committees, including the Prime Minister of India’s Special Advisory Board for Innovation and the International Global Water Challenge. He is a recipient of the Padma Shri and has been the President of the Film and Television Institute of India since 2020.

Jay Lemery, MD, is the Climate & Health Foundation Endowed Chair in Climate Medicine and Professor of Emergency Medicine at the University of Colorado School of Medicine; Chief of the Section of Wilderness & Environmental Medicine, and Faculty in the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health at the Colorado School of Public Health. Dr. Lemery has expertise in austere and remote medical care, as well as the effects of climate change on human health. He is currently the Medical Director for the National Science Foundation’s Polar Research program and the Clinical Scientist of the Science Integration Office of NASA’s Human Research Program. Dr Lemery co-authored Enviromedics: The Impact of Climate Change on Human Health and the landmark New England Journal of Medicine study on ‘Excess Mortality in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria.

Rich Levy is a poet and, since 1995, executive director of Inprint, a literary organization in Houston, Texas. His collections include Why Me? and the letterpress chapbook One or Two Lights, and his poems have appeared in various publications, including Boulevard, Callaloo, The Florida Review, Gulf Coast, The Hopkins Review, Pool, The Texas Observer, and more.

Guru Madhavan is the Norman R. Augustine Senior Scholar and Senior Director of Programs at the U.S. National Academy of Engineering. He is a prize-winning author of essays and books, including Applied Minds: How Engineers Think and Wicked Problems: How to Engineer a Better World.

Andrew Quintman is a scholar of Buddhism in Tibet and the Himalayas and an associate professor and chair of the Department of Religion at Wesleyan University. He writes, teaches, and lectures widely about Buddhist literature and history, sacred geography, pilgrimage, and the visual cultures of the Himalayan region.

Sanjoy K. Roy, an entrepreneur of the arts, is the Managing Director of Teamwork Arts, which produces over 33 highly acclaimed performing arts, visual arts, and literary festivals in 40 cities across the world, including the iconic annual Jaipur Literature Festival, international editions of JLF, and the launched-during-lockdown digital series, JLF Brave New World. He is a founder trustee of Salaam Baalak Trust, providing support services for street and working children in Delhi. Roy works closely with various industry bodies and the government on policy issues in the cultural sector in India, and has lectured and collaborated with leading international universities. He is the Co-Chair of the FICCI creative industries Committee.

Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan is a scholar of South Asian and Asian-American literature at Rice University. Her books include Overdetermined (2025), What is We? (2025), and the co-written memoir The End Doesn’t Happen All at Once (2025). She is also a co-editor of the award-winning volume Thinking with an Accent (2023).

Liara Tamani lives in Houston, Texas. She is the author of the acclaimed young adult novels Calling My Name, a 2018 PEN America Literary Award Finalist and SCBWI Golden Kite Finalist, and All the Things We Never Knew, a 2020 Kirkus Best YA Book of the Year. Her other books include What She Missed and her forthcoming novel, This Ain’t Our First Rodeo. Her words have appeared in Time Magazine, NPR, and The New York Times. And her work has been featured by Good Morning America, Buzzfeed, Essence Magazine, Teen Vogue, and more.

Sunanda Vashisht is a writer, political commentator, and columnist. She writes for several news portals and has been a columnist for the Mumbai-based Daily News and Analysis (DNA) newspaper. Her area of focus has been conflict ridden state of Jammu and Kashmir and she has written extensively on the conflict in what is considered the most volatile region of South Asia.

Rebekah F. Ward is the Houston Chronicle‘s climate & environment reporter. Before coming to Texas, Rebekah was an investigative journalist at the Albany Times Union, where she started in 2021 as the newsroom’s first Joseph T. Lyons fellow. She has worked for outlets including Reuters, France 24 and the OCCRP, reporting from the U.S., Colombia, Mexico and her native Canada.