Books & Films

Books:

• CREDO: An Anthology of Manifestos and Sourcebook for Creative Writing.  Eds. Rita Banerjee and Diana Norma Szokolyai.  Winston-Salem, NC: C&R Press, May 2018.
• Echo in Four Beats (poetry debut).  Georgetown, KT: Finishing Line Press, March 9, 2018.
  • Selected for the Ruth Stone Foundation Podcast (2020)
  • Nominated for the 2019 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize at the Academy of American Poets
  • Finishing Line Press’s 2018 Nominee for the National Book Award in Poetry
  • Nominated for the 2018 Kate Tufts Discovery Award
  • Book Riot’s “Must-Read Poetic Voices of Split This Rock 2018
  • Finalist for the 2017 Three Mile Harbor Poetry Book Prize
  • Shortlisted for Aquarius Press 2016 Willow Books Literature Award
  • Finalist for Red Hen Press 2015 Benjamin Saltman Award
• A Night with Kali (novella).  Approaching Footsteps: Four Novellas by Women.  Ed. Patricia Flaherty Pagan.  Houston, TX: Spider Road Press, November 2016.
• Cracklers at Night (poetry chapbook).  Georgetown, KT: Finishing Line Press, 2010.
  • (First Honorable Mention for Best Poetry Book of 2011-2012 in the Los Angeles Book Festival)

Film:

• Burning Down the Louvre.  dir. Rita Banerjee and David Shields.  Documentary Film.  Forthcoming: 2023.

Dissertation:

• The New Voyager: Theory and Practice of South Asian Literary Modernisms.  Harvard University, Dissertation. Cambridge, MA: ProQuest, 2013.

Rita Banerjee’s dissertation, The New Voyager: Theory and Practice of South Asian Literary Modernisms,investigates how literary modernisms in Bengali, Hindi, and Indian English functioned as much as a turning away and remixing of earlier literary traditions as a journey of engagement between the individual writer and his or her response to and attempts to re-create the modern world. This thesis explores how theories and practices of literary modernism developed in Bengali, Hindi, and Indian English in the early to mid-20^th century, and explores the representations and debates surrounding literary modernisms in journals such as Kallol, Kavitā, and Krittibās in Bengali, the Nayī Kavitā journal and the Tār Saptak group in Hindi, and the Writers Workshop group in English. Theories of modernism and translation as proposed by South Asian literary critics such as Dipti Tripathi, Acharya Nand Dulare Bajpai, Buddhadeva Bose, and Bhola Nath Tiwari are contrasted to the manifestos of modernism found in journals such as Krittibās and against Agyeya’s defense of experimentalism (prayogvād) from the Tār Saptak anthology. The dissertation then goes on to discuss how literary modernisms in South Asia occupied a vital space between local and global traditions, formal and canonical concerns, and between social engagement and individual expression. In doing so, this thesis notes how the study of modernist practices and theory in Bengali, Hindi, and English provides insight into the pluralistic, multi-dimensional, and ever-evolving cultural sphere of modern South Asia beyond the suppositions of postcolonial binaries and monolingual paradigms.