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Maya Shanbhag Lang is the author of What We Carry, named a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and a “Best Of 2020” by Amazon, Parade Magazine, Times of India, and others. She is also the author of The Sixteenth of June, named a Must-Read Novel by CBS and InStyle and long listed for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize.

Lang’s essays have been widely published and anthologized. Her most recent piece appears in The Lonely Stories: 22 Celebrated Writers on the Subject of Loneliness. In 2021, the American Civil Rights Museum named her a “Woman You Should Know.” Winner of the Neil Shepard Prize in Fiction, she has received fellowships from the Rona Jaffe Foundation, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and others.

After graduating magna cum laude from Swarthmore College, Lang earned her M.A. from NYU and her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from SUNY Stony Brook. Her dissertation, “The Hypochondriac: Bodies in Protest from Herman Melville to Toni Morrison,” won the Mildred and Herbert Weisinger Award. A passionate teacher and editor, she loves working with established and aspiring writers alike. 

Lang is the daughter of South Asian immigrants and lives outside of New York City with her daughter. She is also a competitive-class weightlifter.