Minal Hajratwala (they/she) has been coaching authors since the 2009 publication of their first book, Leaving India: My Family’s Journey From Five Villages to Five Continents, which was called “incomparable” by Alice Walker and “searingly honest” by the Washington Post. It won a Pen USA Award, an Asian American Writers Workshop Award, a Lambda Literary Award, and a California Book Award.

Minal is also the author of a poetry collection, Bountiful Instructions for Enlightenment, and a travel guidebook, Moon Fiji. In 2010-11 they spent a year as a Fulbright-Nehru Senior Scholar in Mumbai, then moved to Bangalore for six years. While in India, they edited a groundbreaking anthology, Out! Stories from the New Queer India, and co-founded a poetry press, The (Great) Indian Poetry Collective, which published nine books by emerging poets.

As a journalist, Minal was most recently an editor-at-large at Zócalo Public Square during the first year of the pandemic. She started her career as an intern reporter-researcher at TIME magazine. In the 1990s, she ran the Sunday Perspective section of the San Jose Mercury News.

A turning point came in 2000, when Minal was awarded a yearlong National Arts Journalism Program fellowship at Columbia University. She enjoyed a practicum with Jessica Hagedorn’s Dogeaters production at The Public Theater, and she took the j-school’s renowned Book Seminar, where she wrote a proposal that resulted in a six-figure book contract with a major publisher.

Minal spent seven years researching and writing the book that became Leaving India, traveling the world to interview more than 75 members of her extended family. The writing was often difficult, and in hindsight, those seven years were an intensive study of craft, writer’s block, internalized oppression, and how to develop one’s own supportive writing community. Since publishing Leaving India to critical acclaim, Minal has turned their knowledge and editorial expertise toward supporting other writers as a coach and teacher.