Keya Mitra is the author of the short-story collection Bad Babies, a finalist for the prestigious 2024 AWP Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction and 2024 Prairie Schooner Raz-Shumaker Book Prize in Short Fiction, and Almost Born, a memoir-in-essays featuring the title essay, which recently won the 2024 Missouri Review Perkoff Prize in Nonfiction. Her novels include Immigrant Delay Disease, Human Enough—a finalist for the 2021 PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction—and Love After Life. In addition to this year’s honors, her short-story collection has also garnered finalist honors for the Bakeless Prize, Flannery O’Connor Short Fiction Award, Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction, and Dzanc Diverse Voices Prize, as well as being a semifinalist for the Iowa Short Fiction Award. Her short fiction has appeared in The Kenyon Review, Best New American Voices, The Bellevue Literary Review, The Southwest Review, and many others, earning finalist and semifinalist recognition in numerous prestigious competitions. Her work has received recognition across genres.

A section from her novel-in-progress, Immigrant Delay Disease, won the 2021 Tobias Wolff Prize and was published in the Bellingham Review. In 2022, she received the prestigious $10,000 Arnold L. Graves and Lois S. Graves Award in the Humanities for her research in Meghalaya, India, where the novel is set.

Keya holds a PhD and MFA from the University of Houston’s creative writing program and is a Fulbright Scholar. Currently, she is a Professor of Creative Writing and Literature at Pacific University, where she has been awarded the President’s Award for Excellence in Teaching. She directed the creative writing and editing and publishing programs for years and served as Editor-in-Chief of the internationally distributed literary magazine, Silk Road Review: A Literary Crossroads.