Kirun Kapur was born in Norwalk, Connecticut, in the USA, and has lived in North America and South Asia. She wrote for a feminist Indian magazine, Manushi, and traveled through Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa. She has earned recognition for her writing; her first work Visiting Indira Gandhi’s Palmist received the Antivenom Poetry Award in 2013 and was also the finalist for the Mass Book Prize and the Julie Suk Award. Currently, she teaches at Amherst College and is the director of the Creative Writing Program. She is the editor of Beloit Poetry Journal, one of America’s oldest publications on poetry. She lives in North Boston.