Vauhini Vara: Visiting Fiction Writer Workshop

The Creative Arts Committee of MCC is pleased to present a live workshop with visiting fiction writer Vauhini Vara.

• Date: Wednesday, October 30th
• Time: 11:00 am to 11:50 am 
• Location: R. Thomas Flynn Campus Center Forum, room 3-130

The event is free and open to the public. Those who wish to attend the event remotely can access the workshop through Zoom.

Vauhini Vara is a journalist, editor, novelist, short story writer, essayist, and playwright who lives in Colorado. Her debut novel, The Immortal King Rao (Norton, 2022), was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, was shortlisted for the National Book Critics’ Circle’s John Leonard Prize and the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, and won the Colorado Book Award. It is being adapted for television and has been published around the English-speaking world, including in India, where it won the Atta Galatta Bangalore Literature Festival Book Prize and the Times of India AutHer Award. Vara’s story collection, This is Salvaged (Norton, 2023) was named by The New Yorker, Publisher’s Weekly, Vox, and the New York Public Library as a notable book of the year in which it was published; it was longlisted for The Story Prize and, in India, won the Kalinga Literary Festival Fiction Book Award. It will be followed by an essay collection, Searches (Pantheon, 2025). Vara is also the author of a play, Ghost Variations — a stage adaptation of her essay “Ghosts” — which was selected to be performed as part of the Denver Center for the Performing Arts’s 2024 Colorado New Play Summit. Vara’s fiction has received an O. Henry Award, as well as honors from the Rona Jaffe Foundation, the Canada Council for the Arts, MacDowell, and Yaddo. Her creative nonfiction has also been honored by the Canada Council for the Arts and has been anthologized in The Best American Essays series. She is a journalist and editor as well. A mentor at the Lighthouse Writers Workshop Book Project and the secretary for Periplus, a collective whom mentor writers of color, she was named a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Colorado State University for 2023-24.