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A few more professional hats I’ve worn: teacher, saleswoman, waitress, nightclub doorwoman (yes, really), bartender, engineer, marketing executive, management consulting executive, financial advisor, yoga instructor, podcaster, digital media startup founder, and literary editor.
Act I in my twenties and thirties was about the immigrant hustle: leaving India, living and working across five countries, thirteen cities, and sixteen homes.
Act II in my forties was about the writing and translating hustle: leaving my Silicon Valley career, running four fairly popular digital magazines (two of them concurrently), publishing three critically-acclaimed books (two of them in the same year, on different continents), publishing 100+ bylines at venues like NPR, The Guardian, and The Washington Post, teaching creative writing workshops, getting married, becoming a dog mommy, and—yes, wait for it—living and working across two countries, five cities, and six homes.
I hope Act III in my fifties will involve less moving and more books. To that end, in the fall of 2023, I began a five-year Ph.D. program in literature and translation studies at the University of Texas at Dallas, where I also teach Creative Writing and Literary Translation courses. My research interests are Translation Studies, Literary Translation, South Asian Literary Studies, and Postmodern and Contemporary Literature.
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I aim to be the kind of diasporic writer who’s truly transnational, who has immersed themselves in and studied both worlds of their hyphenated identities. A writer whose art can speak for both their peoples. A writer who can honor, not fetishize or exoticize, what they’ve left behind while also embracing what they call home now.
~Jenny Bhatt, Keynote speech at the Qissa Literature Festival, Sophia College (Autonomous), Mumbai (February 17, 2022)
Jenny Bhatt is an author, a literary translator, a book critic, and a 2025 NEA Translation Fellow. She has taught creative writing at various organizations, including the University of Texas at Dallas, Writing Workshops Dallas, and the PEN America Emerging Voices Fellowship Program.
Currently, she is a Ph.D. (literature) candidate at the University of Texas at Dallas, where she also teaches Creative Writing and Literary Translation courses. Her research interests are Translation Studies, Literary Translation, South Asian Literary Studies, and Postmodern and Contemporary Literature.
Jenny lives in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex, Texas.
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Therefore, a literary translation like this collection seeks to be a mode of recovery and reclamation. It hopes to be a disruptive intervention in cultural discourse. Most of all, it aspires to be a glorious revival of diverse, almost-lost literary traditions such that, if transplanted with care and attention, they might bear rich, new fruit.
~Jenny Bhatt, Breaking Down the Translation Pyramid: On Translating Dhumketu’s Pioneering Short Stories from Gujarati, Literary Hub (August 01, 2022)
Jenny Bhatt is a writer, literary translator, and book critic. She is a 2025 NEA Translation Fellow. She has taught creative writing at various organizations, including the University of Texas at Dallas, Writing Workshops Dallas, and the PEN America Emerging Voices Fellowship Program. She is the founder of Desi Books, a global forum that showcased South Asian literature from the world over (active from March 2020 to February 2023.) Currently, she is a Ph.D. (literature) candidate at the University of Texas at Dallas, where she also teaches Creative Writing and Literary Translation courses. Her research interests are Translation Studies, Literary Translation, South Asian Literary Studies, and Postmodern and Contemporary Literature.
Her story collection, Each of Us Killers, won a 2020 Foreword INDIES Award. Her literary translation, Ratno Dholi: Dhumketu’s Best Short Stories was shortlisted for a 2021 Valley of Words Award. One of her short stories was included in The Best American Mystery and Suspense 2021 and another received ‘Distinguished Mention’ in The Best American Mystery and Suspense 2024. The US edition of her Dhumketu translation, The Shehnai Virtuoso and Other Stories, was released in July 2022. Her short fiction has also appeared in several other anthologies.
Her nonfiction has been published at NPR, The Guardian, The Washington Post, BBC Culture, The Atlantic, The Paris Review, Publishers Weekly, The Dallas Morning News, Literary Hub, Poets & Writers, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Star Tribune, and more.
She resides in the in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex, Texas. Find her at https://jennybhattwriter.com.
See a longer version of the bio below. Message here. Media friends: please go here.
Two things, I know now, can definitely be true at the same time: an emerging writer can also be a middle-aged writer.
~Jenny Bhatt, ‘Emerging’ as a Writer — After 40', Longreads (November 28, 2018)
Jenny Bhatt is an author, a literary translator, and a book critic. She is a 2025 NEA Translation Fellow. Currently, she is a Ph.D. student of literature at the University of Texas at Dallas. She has taught creative writing at Writing Workshops Dallas and the PEN America Emerging Voices Fellowship Program. Sign up for her free newsletters, We Are All Translators and/or Historical Fiction Craft Notes. Jenny lives in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex, Texas. (Photo Credit: Pixel Voyage Photography / Arushi Gupta)
