Chaya Babu, Writer
Chaya Babu is a writer and journalist based in Brooklyn, New York. Her work, which focuses largely on race, migration, and gender and sexuality, has appeared in The Margins, The Feminist Wire, Huffington Post, Wall Street Journal, Racialicious, and more. She was a 2016 BuzzFeed Emerging Writers Fellow, a 2015 Open City Fellow at the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, and she’s currently a blog editor at the Brooklyn Quarterly. Starting the fall, she will be attending Pratt Institute’s MFA in writing, while hopefully working as a teaching artist! She also organizes with East Coast Solidarity Summer (a political education program for South Assian youth), and is on the board of the South Asian Women’s Creative Collective. She is working on her first novel.
TATIP Work
Chaya has been interning at PS 676 in Red Hook with CWP Mentor Teaching Artists Jashua Sa-Ra and Adia Whitaker.
“It’s been a joy working at the Red Hook Neighboorhood school with second graders, observing Jashua and Adia bring magic into the classroom. Their collaborative efforts in melding poetry and movement into seamless lessons for young people has been an enormous privilege – especially on the harder days. They always step up, and they make it look so easy when it’s not. Witnessing their work has given me the ability to envision myself doing the same, which is not something I could have ever imagined a year ago. I also feel incredibly lucky to have been paired with Simone, the movement half of our own writing/dance duo. We worked together well and also have a new strong friendship. One of the other huge takeaways from the TATIP for me was feeling my pull toward doing work in correctional facilities – I hope to make that happen.”
Most Memorable TATIP Moment
“I think my most memorable moment was Adia explaining to a student, in plain terms, that the word “picnic” comes from the history of lynching black people, as the children were coming up with words that make them think of summer. They were all ears, and so eager to learn truths.”
Find out more about Chaya here:
There Can Be No Sex in Bollywood
Prepping for My First Marathon
Men Loiter, Women Cloister
A Stranger In Our Midst
Good Girls Don’t Say Such Things
Check out Chaya’s Lesson Plan she presented with her partner Simone Johnson.
Interested in TATIP? Find out more about our 2016-17 Program!
See more of our 2015-16 Graduates in the 2016 TATIP Anthology!
