Readings: Rochelle Potkar
We are proud to have Rochelle as one of Caesurae members. As a creative artist, she came over to Gangtok for a Haibun and Haiku workshop and readings in a Caesurae-Rachna collaborative event, at the Rachna Bookstore. Caesurae members met her for the first time at the Hyderabad Literary Festival, 2016, and since then Rochelle has joined our Society and has been working closely with us.
Fictionist and poet, Rochelle Potkar’s collection, The Arithmetic of breasts and other stories was shortlisted for The Digital Book of the Year 2014 Publishing Next award. Four Degrees of Separation is her first book of poetry, (Paperwall, 2016).
Widely anthologized, she won a gold place for her story, ‘The point of Irish coffee’ (Revenge Ink), and an Editor’s Choice Award for, ‘Ramayan redux’ (Triangulation: Parch, USA). Her poem, ‘Knotted inside me’ was shortlisted for The RL Poetry Award 2013. She won a second place for ‘Swing’ at the Wordweavers contest 2014. She won the 2016 Open Road Review contest for her story, ‘The leaves of the deodar’.
Rochelle was a writer-in-residence at the UNESCO city of literature – Iowa’s International Writing Program (IWP), 2015. Her works were dramatically read and interpreted on stages in Iowa and Portland, Maine.
She is also the alumna of the University of East Anglia’s creative-writing workshop, Kolkata. Currently, she is the poetry editor at The Bombay Review, and editor at the Joao Roque Literary Review.
She has read poetry at a few literature and poetry festivals in Mumbai, Goa, Hyderabad, Chennai, Kolkata, Agartala, Hong Kong, and Iowa.
Rochelle conducts creative writing workshops, and is on the Subject Board for the English undergraduate syllabus at KJ Somaiya College and St. Xavier's College - Autonomous, Mumbai.
