‘The Way You Make Me Feel’ by Nina Sharma ’16 to be Published by Penguin Press

A debut nonfiction essay collection, The Way You Make Me Feel: Interracial Love in Black and Brown, by Nina Sharma ’16 was recently bought by Juli Kyan at Penguin Press.

The Way You Make Me Feel explores the meaning of allyship told through Sharma’s Afro-Asian marriage. Sharma’s essay “The Way You Make Me Feel” won first place in the 2016 Blueshift Prizes for writers of color, judged by author Jeffrey Renard Allen, and also appears in The Blueshift Journal under the Brutal Nation feature.

Sharma’s other essays include “Not Dead”, which was nominated for a Pushcart Prize, “The Bride’s Goodbye”, which was nominated for the Best of the Net 2017 anthology, and “Shithole Country Clubs,” which was named an Editors’ Pick at Longreads. Read more of Sharma's work here.

Sharma is a writer and performer from Edison, New Jersey. She graduated from Columbia University with an MA from the American Studies, Liberal Studies program and an MFA in nonfiction. Her work has been featured in The New Yorker, Electric Literature, The Margins, Teachers & Writers Magazine, The Asian American Literary Review, Drunken Boat, and elsewhere. 

Sharma is a co-founder and member of the all-South Asian American female improv group Not Your Biwi and was formerly the Programs Director at the Asian American Writers’ Workshop. With Quincy Scott Jones, she co-created Blackshop, a column that thinks about allyship between BIPOC people, featured on Anomaly. Sharma currently teaches at Barnard College and Catapult.