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G

Ganesan, Indira (1960– )
Born in Srirangam, India, Ganesan moved to St.
Louis, Missouri, at age five. Best known for her
contribution to the growing body of contempo-
rary Indian literature, Ganesan has been compared
to writers such as Arundhati Roy and CHITRA BA-
NERJEE DIVAKARUNI. She received her bachelor of
arts degree in English from Vassar College in 1982
and a master of fine arts in fiction from the Uni-
versity of Iowa in 1984.
Ganesan received fellowships from the Mary
Ingraham Bunting Institute at Radcliffe (1997–
98), the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown
(1984–85), the MacDowell Colony, and the Paden
Institute for Writers of Color in Essex, New York.
She was also a Vassar College W.K. Rose Fellow.
She has held teaching positions at Vassar College,
Radcliffe College, the University of Missouri, the
University of San Diego, and the University of Cal-
ifornia at Santa Cruz. Ganesan currently teaches
in the Humanities Division at Southampton Col-
lege of Long Island University, at New College of
California’s Writing and Consciousness Program,
and is on the creative writing faculty at Lesley
University. She was also a faculty mentor at the
North Country Institute and Retreat for Writers
of Color.
She has been a fiction editor for the literary
journal Many Mountains Moving and wrote the
introduction to the Signet Classic edition of Nectar

in a Sieve by Kamala Markandaya. Ganesan’s work

has been anthologized in Half & Half: Writers on

Growing Up Biracial & Bicultural, and she is widely

published in several literary journals and women’s

magazines. Ganesan was also a judge for the 2003

First Words South Asian Literary Prize.

Ganesan’s novels include The JOURNEY (1990),

for which she was selected as a finalist in Granta’s

Best Young American Novelists Under Forty con-

test (1996), and INHERITANCE (1998), chosen as a

Barnes & Noble Discover New Writers selection

for Winter 1998. Her novels weave the intricacy

of family with the desire to become independent.

In the end, the novel’s sense of family is so closely

interwoven with the ability to be independent that

it no longer appears to be a negative circumstance

of living but rather a welcome space to reside in.

Ganesan also thematizes the sense of loss, the

transposition of bicultural lives, and the struggle

between Indian cultural tradition and contempo-

rary Western society.

Anne Marie Fowler

Gangster of Love, The

Jessica Hagedorn (1996)

The Gangster of Love is the second novel of Fili-

pino-American writer and multimedia artist JES-

SICA HAGEDORN. It portrays the connections and

divergences between Filipino and Filipino-Ameri-