Indian American poet Vandana Khannaspeaks with Todd Hatton on Sounds Good ahead of her reading next week at MSU's Clara M. Eagle Gallery, part of Murray State's 2016 Creative Writing MFA Summer Residency. Khanna’s work has won the Crab Orchard Review First Book Prize and the Miller Williams Arkansas Poetry Prize as well as been nominated for the Pushcart Prize.
Khanna says as a youth she was caught between two cultures. She and her brother wanted to be and felt American but her parents insisted they were Indian. She says they had to negotiate between their world inside the home and the world outside.
“For me, growing up and my childhood was really trying to figure out how to get a voice that would say something meaningful, that wasn’t just sort of mimicking what my parents wanted and/or mimicking what I saw when I stepped outside my house. So for me, the whole idea of getting and gaining a voice through writing, that was my medium. My writing was my medium to getting there,” Khanna said.
Khanna’s first two collections, “Train to Agra” and “Afternoon Masala,” focused on growing up and gaining a voice as an individual and a woman. She says in her third collection she shifts her focus to exploring how to maintain individuality while becoming part of a relationship or part of a group.
Khanna says she hopes listeners leave her readings with one image or moment they will carry with them for years. She reads at the Clara M. Eagle Gallery July 12 at 7:30 p.m.