Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni is an award-winning author and poet. Her work is widely known, as she has been published in over 50 magazines, including the Atlantic Monthly and The New Yorker, and her writing has been included in over 30 anthologies. Her works have been translated into 11 languages, including Dutch, Hebrew and Japanese.

She was born in India and lived there until 1976, until she was nineteen, at which point she left Calcutta and came to the United States. She continued her education in the field of English by receiving a Master's degree from Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio, and a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley.

To earn money for her education, she held many odd jobs, including babysitting, selling merchandise in an Indian boutique, slicing bread in a bakery, and washing instruments in a science lab. At Berkeley, she lived in the International House and worked in the dining hall. She briefly lived in Illinois, Ohio and Texas, but has spent most of her life in Northern California, which she often writes about.

Divakaruni currently teaches in the nationally ranked Creative Writing program area at the Univ. of Houston and divides her time between Houston and Northern California. She serves on the board of Maitri in the Bay and on the Advisory Board of Asians against Domestic Abuse in Houston.

In 2000, Divakaruni was one of the judges for the prestigious National Book Award.

Two of her books, The Mistress of Spices and Sister of My Heart, have been optioned by filmmakers Gurinder Chadha (for an English film) and Suhasini Mani Ratnam (for a Tamil TV serial) respectively.

Co-presented by the Asia Society California.