South Asian Journalists Association will be hosting its 25th anniversary gala on Saturday, October 5, 2019 at the grand ballroom of WeWork, Bryant Park. We're celebrating 25 years of SAJA and the ever growing and ever achieving world of journalism relating to South Asians and South Asian. We will be honoring journalists with awards in 8 categories. There will be wine, food, shop talk, nostalgia and a whole lot of great people to meet - basically, every reason you should be there. 

SAJA invites you to join in celebrating 25 wonderful years of the South Asian journalists' community.

REGISTER HERE  

KEYNOTE PANEL 

WRITING ON ETHNICITIES, STATE AND CITIZENSHIP IN OUR TIMES  

Amitava Kumar is the author of several works of nonfiction and two novels. Kumar’s most recent novel is Immigrant, Montana, included in the list of most “notable books of the year” at the New York Times and also the “best books of the year” at The New Yorker. (Former President Barack Obama also named Immigrant, Montana among his favorite books of the year.) In Spring 2020, Duke University Press will publish Kumar’s book on writing and style, Every Day I Write the Book. In 2016, Kumar was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for nonfiction and also a Ford Fellowship from US Artists. His writing has been published in Granta, Harper’s, The New Yorker, the Guardian, Brick, Vanity Fair, and the New York Times. Kumar has been awarded residencies at Yaddo, MacDowell Colony, the Lannan Foundation, the Norman Mailer Writing Colony, and the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center in Italy. He is the Helen D. Lockwood Professor of English at Vassar College.
@amitavakumar

Mira Jacob is the author and illustrator of Good Talk: A Memoir in Conversations. Her critically acclaimed novel, The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing, was a Barnes & Noble Discover New Writers pick, shortlisted for India’s Tata First Literature Award, and longlisted for the Brooklyn Literary Eagles Prize. It was named one of the best books of 2014 by Kirkus Reviews, the Boston Globe, Goodreads, Bustle, and The Millions. Her writing and drawings have appeared in The New York Times, Electric Literature, Tin House, Literary Hub, Guernica, Vogue, the Telegraph, and Buzzfeed, and she has a drawn column on Shondaland. She currently teaches at The New School, and she is a founding faculty member of the MFA Program at Randolph College.
@mirajacob

Dr. Neeraj Kaushal is an economist and journalist by training, and an expert on comparative immigration policy and the author of a new book on this topic, Blaming Immigrants. She is professor of Social Policy and chair of the doctoral program at Columbia School of Social Work. In Blaming Immigrants: Nationalism and the Economics of Global Movement she investigates the core causes of rising disaffection towards immigrants globally and tests common complaints against immigration. She has authored or co-authored over 50 peer-reviewed scientific articles and book chapters on immigrants and other vulnerable populations. She writes a monthly column in the Economic Times, India’s largest financial daily.

Suketu Mehta is the New York-based author of This Land is Our Land: An Immigrant’s Manifesto (2019) and Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found (2005), which won the Kiriyama Prize and the Hutch Crossword Award, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, the Lettre Ulysses Prize, the BBC4 Samuel Johnson Prize, and the Guardian First Book Award. He has won the O. Henry Prize, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship for his fiction, a Whiting Award in Fiction and Nonfiction, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He has also written original screenplays for films, including New York, I Love You (2008) and Mission Kashmir (2000). His work has been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, National Geographic, Granta, Harper’s, Time, and Newsweek, and has been featured on NPR’s Fresh Air and All Things Considered. He is an Associate Professor of Journalism at New York University.
@suketumehta

EVENT PROGRAM 

6-7 PM
Registration & Cocktail Hour  

7 PM
SAJA Over The Years : A panel of SAJA board members promise to everyone down the memory lane.
Panelists: Sree Sreenivasan, Anusha Shrivastava, Vikas Bajaj, Sharaf Mowjood, Jyoti Thottam.
Moderator: Prerana Thakurdesai  

7.45 PM
SAJA Journalism Awards presentation

8.10 PM
Keynote Panel: Writing on Ethnicities, State & Citizenship in our times with Amitava Kumar & Suketu Mehta 

9PM
Networking Hour