Discipline: Literature – poetry

Indran Amirthanayagam

Discipline: Literature – poetry
Region: Brooklyn, NY
MacDowell Fellowships: 1992

Indran Amirthanayagam is a Sri Lankan-American poet-diplomat, essayist, and translator working in English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, and Haitian Creole. When he was eight years old, he moved with his family to London, England, and at age 14, his family moved again to Honolulu, Hawaii, where he began writing. He studied at Punahou School in Honolulu and played cricket at the Honolulu Cricket Club. He then studied English Literature at Haverford College where he also captained their cricket team during his last year. Amirthanayagam has an M.A. in journalism from Columbia University. His poems have been published in The United States of Poetry, World English Poetry, Language for a New Century, ALOUD: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, The Open Boat: Poems from Asian America, The Nuyorasian Anthology, Black Lightning, Living in America, The Four Way Reader #1, Grand Street, The Kenyon Review, The Massachusetts Review, Exquisite Corpse, Hanging Loose, BOMB, and elsewhere.

Studios

Wood

Indran Amirthanayagam worked in the Wood studio.

Wood Studio, given to the residency program by Mrs. Frederick Trevor Hill, was completed in 1913 in memory of Mrs. Hill’s mother, Helen Ogden Wood. Like Schelling Studio, the building is sided with large, overlapping pieces of hemlock bark. When the studio was renovated in 1995, MacDowell staff researched the origins of this unusual building material and…

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