Chaya Babu is a writer, journalist, educator, and healer. Her written work centers largely on the themes of race, gender and sexuality, cities, migration, and systemic and intergenerational trauma. Her journalistic work has appeared in Open City, VICE, CNN, The Huffington Post, The Feminist Wire, Racialicious and more. At India Abroad, the oldest and largest newspaper covering and serving the South Asian American diaspora, where she was a staff reporter for three years, Chaya transformed the nature of news and commentary about the community, pushing for a more critical lens on issues pertaining to South Asians in the US. Her stories there spanned a wide range of coverage, from anti-blackness in brown communities, caste patriarchy, and Hindu fundamentalism, to reproductive justice, domestic violence, hate crimes and more. Chaya's literary writing, on which she is currently focusing her attention as she pursues her MFA in Writing at Pratt Institute, aims to approach similar topics from a different angle. Her essays and creative nonfiction have been featured in BuzzFeed, The Margins, Du-Kool Magazine, and others, with a forthcoming piece in a book titled Go Home!—an Asian & Asian-American Anthology of Prose and Poetry, to be published by the Feminist Press and the Asian American Writers' Workshop in March, 2018. For her culture writing, Chaya was selected as a 2016 BuzzFeed Emerging Writers Fellow and a 2015 AAWW Open City Fellow, and as an emerging artist, she has work in the gallery exhibition "Incision" at Project for Empty Space in Newark. She holds an MS in Journalism from Medill and a BA in English from Duke.
