Welcome to the Writers Series on Voices on the Side!

As part of celebrating my upcoming book - Mom, Unfiltered: Maternal Mental Health and Finding Freedom through Motherhood - I'll be focusing the podcast on conversations with fellow writers. From authors to essayists to journalists and professors, we are going to be talking about all things writing.

In this first episode of the series, Joon Ae takes the position of host and interviewer and asks me about the book and how I became a writer.

If you have a favorite writer you'd love to hear from or a specific question you're wondering about, leave it for me in the reviews (Apple) or comments (Spotify).

Joon Ae website

Leah website

Anjali Rao is an author, yoga educator and practitioner. She brings an intersectional and decolonial feminist lens to the study of philosophy and yoga history integrating storytelling, art and poetry.

Emphasizing an embodied approach, her work interrogates the link between religions, politics and yoga. She is on the faculty of multiple yoga teacher training programs—her areas of specialization includes deconstructing the dynamics between caste, gender, nationalism and colonialism. She is the host of The Love of Yoga podcast bridging scholarship, activism and yoga.

Anjali's book Yoga As Embodied Resistance: A Feminist Lens in Caste, Gender And Sacred Resilience in Yoga History was recently selected as one of the top 10 most insightful yoga books by Yoga Journal.

Anjali website

Leah website

Kavita Das is a an author and mother who has worked for social change for close to fifteen years, addressing issues ranging from community and housing inequities, to public health disparities, to racial injustice. Her first book Poignant Song: The Life and Music of Lakshmi Shankar tells the life story of Grammy-nominated Hindustani singer Lakshmi Shankar.

Kavita has been a regular contributor to NBC News Asian America, Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Rumpus. In addition, her work has been published in Salon, WIRED, Poets & Writers, Catapult, LitHub, Tin House, Longreads, Kenyon Review, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Guernica, McSweeney’s, Fast Company, Quartz, Colorlines, Romper, and elsewhere.

Kavita created the popular “Writing About Social Issues” nonfiction seminar, which inspired Craft and Conscience, and has taught at the New School and continues to teach across multiple venues and serve as a guest lecturer.

Kavita Das is currently a Masters in Fine Arts candidate in creative nonfiction and screenwriting at Antioch University where she is the Eloise Klein Healy Scholar. Previously, she received a B.A. in Urban Studies from Bryn Mawr College.

She lives in her hometown of New York City and tries to keep up with the city that never sleeps and her six-year-old daughter Daya.