Vidhu Aggarwal
Vidhu Aggarwal
Born in Ranchi, India, Vidhu Aggarwal (she/they) grew up in the Southern U.S., primarily in Louisiana and Texas.
Their multi-media works in video, poetry, and scholarship are oriented around Bollywood spectacle, carnival, and science fiction.
Her poems appeared in the top 25 of 2016 in Boston Review. Her collection of poems The Trouble with Humpdori (2016) received the Editor's Choice Prize from The (Great) Indian Poetry Collective, was a handpicked selection with Small Press Distribution, and was selected by Sundress Publications as one of the best books of 2016.
Their work has appeared or is forthcoming in Black Warrior Review, Poetry, Leonardo, Entropy, Chicago Quarterly Review, Juked, [PANK], Pedestal, Sugar House Review, INK BRICK, Arc, Counter-Desecration, among others.
A Kundiman fellow, she has worked with John Sims Projects on “The 13 Flag Funerals” in Florida, and with artist Bishakh Som on “Lady Humpadori,” a poetry/comic book collaboration.
Their chapbook, Avatara, is out with Portable Press @ Yo-Yo Labs. Their latest book Daughter Isotope is available at multiple booksellers.
They teach poetry and postcolonial/transnational studies at Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida.
Books available for sale
Daughter Isotope
Daughter Isotope is a book of “hybrid” poems that speaks to multiple iterations of “daughter” tropes across generations, national borders, and timescales. It is organized in a series of four “clouds,” calling up the vague, penetrable borders of our digital lives, both searching and searchable.
The Trouble with Humpadori
The Trouble with Humpadori is a book about the antics of HUMP, a monster/superhero, who shifts in and out of multiple iterations of the racialized body in crisis and morphs into different commodity forms, such as soap and nations.