Roohi Choudhry grew up in Pakistan, Southern Africa and the Middle East and now lives in Brooklyn, NY. Her writing has appeared in Ploughshares, The Kenyon Review, The Normal School, and Callaloo, among others, and has been selected as notable by Best American Short Stories and Best American Essays. A 2015-6 New York Foundation for the Arts fellow, she holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Michigan. She teaches and coaches other writers, and consults for the United Nations. Currently, she is working on an essay collection about migration and a novel set in Durban, South Africa. Learn more at
Lydia is a recent graduate of the Michener Center for Writers. She was an artist-in-residence at Yaddo in October & November of 2016. Her play, The Silent Woman, won the 2015 Kentucky Women Writers Conference Prize and made Honorable Mention on the 2016 Kilroy’s List of best new plays. Her immersive retro-future piece, Apocalypse Radio, will have a world premiere by Theater Ninjas in Cleveland, OH in 2018, directed by Michael Rau. Her one-act, Old Broads, was performed at the Off Shoot in Austin, TX in spring 2014. She is a proud member playwright of the OBIE-winning Youngblood at Ensemble Studio Theater (since 2010). She also belongs to the Brooklyn-based writers’ collective, Kristiania, and the Austin-based political action group, Literary Women in Action. Her play, The Last Great American Bear Hunt, was a finalist for the O’Neill National Playwrights Conference (2016). Lately she has been workshopping a new cassette play, Bear Eats Bear, with director Katie Van Winkle, which has been performed in Bushwick, NY, Toronto, CA and Austin. Bear Eats Bear will be a site-specific installation with outdoor performances in the 2017 Minnesota Fringe. Lydia has been a semi-finalist for Play Penn (2015, 2014), and the Bay Area Playwrights Festival (2014, 2013). Her short plays have been performed in Aspen, Austin, Lake George, NYC, and Paris, France. Her short, Donna's First Brazilian, is published and licensed by Samuel French, Inc. She’s currently working on a contemporary farce and a play exploring the treatment of the mentally ill. Lydia currently resides in Austin, TX with her puppy. She holds an MFA from the Michener Center and a BA from Columbia.
