Anjali Sachdeva’s short story collection, All the Names They Used for God, was the winner of the he 2019 Chautauqua Prize and the 2022 Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire (France), and was named a Best Book of 2018 by NPR. It was named a Best Book of 2018 by NPR, Refinery 29, and BookRiot, longlisted for the Story Prize, and chosen as the 2018 Fiction Book of the Year by the Reading Women podcast. The New York Times Book Review called the collection "strange and wonderful," and Roxane Gay called it, "One of the best collections I’ve ever read. Every single story is a stand out." Her stories have been published in McSweeney’s Quarterly, Lightspeed, Tor.com, and Vogue India, and featured on the LeVar Burton Reads podcast. She is the recipient of a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and an Investing in Professional Artists grant from the Heinz Endowments and the Pittsburgh Foundation.  She currently teaches in the MFA program at Chatham University, and in the low-residency MFA program at Randolph College.

 

She has hiked through the backcountry of Canada, Iceland, Kenya, Mexico, and the United States, and spent much of her childhood reading fantasy novels and waiting to be whisked away to an alternate universe. Instead, she lives in Pittsburgh, which is pretty wonderful as far as places in this universe go.