Pooja
Makhijani was born in Queens, New York (off the 103rd Street-Corona
Plaza stop on the 7 Train) and grew up in Edison, New Jersey (The
Birthplace of Recorded Sound). She began her writing career in her
very pink bedroom where she wrote mystery stories (very similar to
Nancy Drew), babysitting stories (similar to The Baby Sitters
Club), and English boarding school stories (similar to Enid Blyton's
Mallory Tower books, even though Pooja never went to boarding
school and had never visited England). She learned a lot about words
and language, even though her stories weren't that good.
Through middle-school and high-school, she discovered she was writing
all the time - when she woke up, in geometry class (oops!), in her
sleep. She filled many spiral-bound notebooks with poems and essays
and even some movie scripts.
She attended Johns Hopkins University, where she received her degree
in biomedical engineering ("Don't ask," she says). During her four
years there, she fell in love with Baltimore, Maryland (The City
That Reads) and the libraries, used bookstores, storied row houses,
and literary history of this eclectic American city. She still adores
science, even though she is not an engineer.
Once she graduated, she worked in publishing where she learned
tons about how books are edited and marketed and sold. She started
writing "professionally" (which means someone was finally paying
for her words). She received some acceptances, and a lot more rejections,
but soon her bylines appeared in The New York Times, The Village
Voice, The Newark Star-Ledger, The Indian Express, Time Out New
York, India Today, Writing, Weekly Reader, and Time
Out New York Kids among others.
Pooja graduated with her Masters in Fine Arts from Sarah Lawrence
College in Bronxville, New York. She is the editor of Under
Her Skin: How Girls Experience Race in America (Seal Press,
November 2004), an anthology of essays by women that explores the
complex ways in which race shapes American lives and families. Pooja
is deeply interested in using memoir and storytelling to discuss
and deconstruct the idea of race. She has conducted several writing
workshops for young adults on this topic.
She is also the author of Mama's Saris
(Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, 2007). Mama's Saris
tells the story of a precocious girl's desire to dress up in her
mother's beautiful saris. She wrote it after realizing that her
own fascination with her mother's fancy clothes was not unique.
It seemed like all her female friends, regardless of ethnicity,
remember being captivated by their mother's grown-up clothes.
Pooja is particularly proud of the 2003 Magazine Award Honor in
Nonfiction by the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators
for her essay, "The
First Time," in the November/December 2003 issue of Cicada.
She reviews books for Kahani,
a South Asian literary magazine for children. In addition, she teaches
writing and children's literature at Western Connecticut State University's
new MFA in Professional Writing program.
Pooja lives in New York City with her husband and too many books.
Apart from reading and writing, she loves to dance, listen to Bollywood
music, and make chocolate desserts.
