Book Noted

2025 💙🏔️

happy diwali 🪔💛

My first day as a lecturing faculty of creative writing! 📝🫶🏽 I’m teaching a course I’ve designed from the ground up on decolonizing the creative writing canon and writing practice for undergraduates at SF State.

I’ve dreamed of teaching since I was a kid, and this milestone feels extra-momentous. I’m so grateful to everyone who’s encouraged and supported me so that I can get here. Thank you!! 🪴

Napa Valley Writers’ Conference 2025 ✨✍🏽 ~ A week of workshopping, deep craft conversations, & so many brilliant new friends. Honored to have spent workshop time with the phenomenal Sarah Thankam Mathews and this generous, gorgeous group of writers 🫶🏽📚



Image Descriptions:

[1] A group photo of thirteen people standing outdoors under a large tree at the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference. They are smiling at the camera, wearing name tags and a mix of colorful and casual clothing, with trees and a clear sky in the background.

[2] A wider group photo featuring fifteen people in the same location, under the tree.

[3] A group of five people standing together outdoors beneath a tree with large green leaves. They are smiling brightly in the sunlight, dressed casually with conference lanyards.

[4] Another group photo of five people posing cheerfully under the same tree. Everyone is smiling, with arms around one another.

[5] The same group with one other person taking a selfie, under the same tree.

[6] A selfie of two people in front of a glass-walled building. The person on the left, Geetanshi, is a South Asian woman in her twenties wearing a navy blue dress and smiles. The person on the right wears round glasses and a black shirt, grins widely.

[7] A group selfie of four people smiling outside a building with glass doors. The person in front holds the camera, and all are wearing name badges on lanyards.

[8] Five people standing close together, smiling against a backdrop of green trees and a partly cloudy sky.

Continued in comments

june gloom? i don’t know her! 🌈🥳

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Image Descriptions:
 [1] A South Asian woman, Geetanshi, sitting cross-legged on a driftwood bench at the beach, smiling under a cap that says “Audre Lorde,” with wildflowers and ocean in the background. Text overlay: “June.”
[2] A smiling sibling duo standing in front of a brick wall—one in a ruffled navy dress, the other in a graduation cap and gown holding a bouquet of colorful flowers. Text bubble says: “celebrated my little brother’s graduation! he’s amazing!”

[3] Display table at a cozy bookstore featuring q***r books like “Gender Queer,” “Stone Fruit,” and “Only This Beautiful Moment.” Text overlay points to “Only This Beautiful Moment”: “saw my fav q***r book displayed at an indie bookstore!”
[4] Baking sheet with raw puff pastry squares, each topped with fresh sliced or chopped peaches. Captioned: “made pastries with a friend!”

[5] A South Asian woman and a white woman in their mid-twenties sitting close together outdoors at sunset with the Seattle skyline and water in the background. Text reads: “celebrated my friend sam’s graduation!”

[6] Geetanshi smiling at an outdoor table with two cups of vegan ice cream. Text reads: “got my first big teaching job! & celebrated w/ vegan ice cream.”

[7] Close-up of a white mug on a wooden shelf with a smiling rainbow tea bag illustration and the text “LGBTEA.” Caption: “found this pretea cute mug at a q***r art popup.”
[8] Two hands, one brown and one white, wearing matching beaded bracelets, one with a rainbow charm, in front of a window. Text reads: “made bracelets with my friend at the same event.”

[9] A table with crispy dosas, sambar, chutneys, and vada on silver trays. Text overlay: “dosas! yum!”

[10] Colorful graphic with people on a rainbow ramp, including someone in a wheelchair, under the title “All Bodies Welcome Pride Party.” Text at bottom: “attended (& helped host) my first accessible pride event!”

I’m at AWP! 📚✍🏽✨ So excited for three full days of all things writing ~ please say hello if you see me around!

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Image Description: a young Indian American woman in her mid 20s smiles up at the camera, holding her badge to the AWP Conference in her hand. She is wearing a gray shirt, a black jacket, and a gray headband.

I have been feeling angry and sad and frustrated lately. I feel like every day I wake up and realize all over again that so many people…don’t care about other people. And sometimes my anger feels even stronger towards those who do, but only when it relates to them in some way. Those whose advocacy, whose feminism, doesn’t include disabled, q***r, trans, poc lives, and any reordered variation of that sentence. If the marginalized cannot begin to see and consider other marginalized groups, how can we expect those who aren’t marginalized to see and consider anything beyond themselves either? I am astonished, for one, at how so many organizing and social justice spaces have continued to fail to consider the lives of their disabled community, even and especially amidst the pandemic. There is no liberation without collective liberation. Your advocacy isn’t advocacy if it isn’t intersectional.

I have been turning to books and writing more than ever during this time. Some pieces that I have read lately and loved:

- The book Brotherless Night by V.V. Ganeshananthan

- The essay SILENCE BREAKING WOMAN by Terese Marie Mailhot

- The book THE MESSAGE by Ta-Nehisi Coates

- The book CARE WORK by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

I would love to hear what you have been reading recently, what you have come back to and rereading, during this time.

With care and solidarity ❤️ geetanshi

ID: An image of a book display titled RADICAL READS featuring mulitcolored zines and books of all genres centering intersectional and diverse perspectives.

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visited the lovely store in san francisco today ❣️

it truly felt like a dream come true to inhabit a south asian-inspired stationary shop in a city that has come to feel like home, a city where i too decided to depart from the path that was expected and safe to listen to and follow my creativity.

i love seeing south asians do amazing creative things!! we are all capable of so much creativity! ❤️

with pyar,
geetanshi

IDs in comments!

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happy valentine’s 💓 to the bookworms 🐛📚

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ID: [1] a chalkboard sign outside a bookstore with an image of two worms outside with one saying “would you still love me if I was a bookworm?“ And the other responding “always.“ [2] a small table with a tablecloth decorated with tiny red hearts. On top of the table is a bouquet of yellow roses and a tiered tray with many pink and heart-shaped treats. [3] someone carrying a tote bag with a bouquet of flowers sticking out that reads “be gay. Read print.” in three different fonts. [4] a quote that reads “you can search throughout the entire universe for someone who is more deserving of your love and affection than you are yourself…”

“If there are really so many of us, I wonder why we never talk about it. And why I’m still a bit ashamed.”

PARENTHESIS by Elodie Durand is a graphic memoir translated from French that narrates the author’s experience with tumor-related epilepsy. It is actually my introduction to the field of graphic medicine, a unique form of sharing stories about chronic illness and disability that I find incredibly engaging, if not personally the most accessible. I thought this memoir was so effective in capturing the confusion, anger, embarrassment, and grief the author felt experiencing disability, memory loss, and chronic illness as a young adult, and I especially loved that she interspersed it with images that she had drawn during these periods.

It reminded me a bit of Tara Sidhoo Fraser’s WHEN MY GHOST SINGS in that sometimes we need to create a new form of writing to share our experience. Both memoirs create their own forms to share the experience of memory loss, in Fraser’s case a new character called “Ghost,” and in Durand’s case, visuals that she created during her illness and the at times dramatically different art styles throughout the memoir.

There were a few quotes and panels that particularly stood out to me, and I’ve included them above.

February’s prompt for the   is “a memoir by a disabled author.” I’ve selected the book YEAR OF THE TIGER by Alice Wong, a genre-bending memoir in essays about an activist’s journey finding and cultivating community, and the continued fight for disability justice.

You can join my 2025 Disability Reading Challenge Discord (link in bio) if you’re interested in reading my picks for the challenge in community with others!

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Do you want to learn more about disability justice and culture, but don’t know where to start? Do you want to read books by disabled authors, and include disability in your journey of decolonizing your reading? If so, this is the 2025 reading challenge for you! 

Prompts and IDs pinned below!

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exploring bookstores in dubai with 📚💞

📍kinokuniya, dubai mall

📍house of prose, times square center dubai

ID: [1] The interior of kinokuniya books in dubai mall, with lots of lamps hanging from the ceiling above tables of curated book selections. [2-3] interior shots of prose books in dubai, with walls lined with wooden bookshelves, and another square shaped shelf filled with books.

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