My current projects include...

• ஐயோ/AIYO

  Born-digital cybertextual monograph that autoethnographically & fictocritically evokes diasporic-disabled pain in the clinic & academy.

  Using my disability onset, disbelieved appendicitis, and lifelong intergenerational trauma as departure points, ஐயோ/AIYO explores and enacts my orientations to chronic pain and composition and my experience of navigating Eurocentric biomedical and academic institutions as an Eelam Tamil American patient-scholar with chronic pain and fatigue. Combining what I call “kolam grammar” and “repairing digital composition,” ஐயோ/AIYO engages with the chronically pained soulbody and scholarly composition in terms of வித்தியாசம்/viththiyaasam (difference), வலி/vali (pain/power), and a land-based, relational ethos. Its interactive content is designed to evoke rasa (indescribable aesthetic essence) in representing Eelam/Tamil/diasporic models of pain, sensation, medical pluralism, mythology, and genocide, to confront audiences with their own complicity in systems of harm.

  You can find select published excerpts and prototypes from ஐயோ/AIYO below:

  • restoring poetics to scholarship by / rendering it in ancient code-meshed poetry / staves off the தமிழ் thirst / for homeland. (Excerpt, forthcoming lyric essay)
  • Pain and relief come of themselves. Peitho, 27(2). (Excerpt of photo gallery section, modified for cluster conversation)
  • perimortem (in [theoretical] rigor). Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy, 29(2). (Prototype of fictocritical parser-based section written with Inform)
  • Hollow me, hollow me, until only you remain. Spark: A 4C4Equality Journal, 4. (Dissertation version of interactive medical records game written with Texture Writer. Awarded Honorable Mention for 2023 Kairos Award for Best Webtext)
  • The successful text is not always the one that murders me to protect you. (Dissertation version of list essay)
  • “But you look so well!”: The role of dress practices in (un)professionalizing the expression and experience of chronic pain. Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics, 3(2). (Dissertation version of photo essay written with Scalar)
  • The author draws a blank. (Excerpt, performance)
  • The author is in pain. (Excerpt, performance)

• && you promised you would live

  Poetry chapbook unpacking my complicated grief over my father's progressive neurodegenerative disorder and premature death.

  My Appa—a Fulbright scholar, physics professor, and biophysics and physics education researcher—who taught me அறிவுடையார் எல்லா முடையார், arivudaiyar ella mudaiyar, the idea that a person with knowledge has everything—died in 2017 from terminal complications of a progressive neurodegenerative disorder that was initially misdiagnosed and mistreated. His experience unmistakably overlaps with mine. Unlike me, he did not get lucky. && you promised you would live unpacks our shared experiences, signaling the moments when chronic pain and grief disrupt my composition process with orthographic experimentation and incompatible, deteriorating coding syntaxes.

  Selected poems (“terminal,” “memorial &,” “preparedness paradox,” “locate: command not found,” “process management,” and “a physicist and a writer drive to kansas city airport”) are currently under review at The New Yorker, Harper’s, and The Paris Review.

  Represented by Mary Krienke at Sterling Lord Literistic.

• Black Tiger White Van

  Memoir about intergenerational trauma and ways of witnessing the Tamil genocide as a Tamil diaspora member.

  Black Tiger White Van relates my perspective on growing up in the shadow of Sri Lanka’s ethnic conflict as an Eelam Tamil disabled queer woman born in the U.S. Weaving together myths, folktales, family stories, pop culture, images, rumors, and news reports, it rejects the work of sifting fact from fiction, instead aiming to preserve how everything I learned growing up about the conflict and my heritage only served to further obfuscate the truth—if such a thing exists. 

  You can find select published excerpts and prototypes from Black Tiger White Van below:

  • Chaos itself is an order (Modified excerpt)
  • Today is loss that isn’t loss (Excerpt)
  • ThisIsMyManifesto.htm (Excerpt, M.F.A. version)
  • I am always in transition when disaster strikes (Excerpt, M.F.A. version)
  • Numerology (Excerpt, M.F.A. version)
  • The meaning of a machete (Excerpt, M.F.A. version. Nominated for a Pushcart Prize and named to Notable Essays and Literary Nonfiction of 2014 in Best American Essays 2015)
  • White van fear (Excerpt, M.F.A. version)

  Represented by Mary Krienke at Sterling Lord Literistic.