Shastri Akella worked at a street theater troupe and at Google for five years and then earned his MFA in fiction at the University of Massachusetts (Amherst). His works has appeared or is forthcoming in Guernica, Electric Literature, Hypothetical Review, The Common, &Now (Paris edition), Danse Macabre, Oxford E-Author longlist, and other places. His novel, written during his MFA years, a queer love story between Indian street theater actor and an English musician set in postcolonial India, is currently on the market.
The experience of migration lies not in binaries—pleasure-pain and triumph-catastrophe—but rather, like life itself, it resides in the space in between.