Kenyan Indian explosion on the national spoken word scene, Shailja Patel was 2001 Lambda Slam Champion and 2000 Santa Cruz Slam champion. The first featured artist on the South Asian Literature and Art Archive, thesala.com, she participated in the Nautilus Institute’s prestigious Scenarios Workshop 2004, along with legends of the Left such as Daniel Ellsberg.

Shailja’s work appears in numerous journals and anthologies, and the CD, Best of the Berkeley Slam Poets. Her poems featured in June Jordan’s Poetry For The People program at UC Berkeley, have been translated into Gujurati and Italian, and are used in colleges, high schools and workshops across the country. Awards include an Outwrite 1999 Poetry Prize and a Voices Of Our Nations Arts Foundation Poetry Scholarship. She was semifinalist for the 2000 Emily Dickinson Award and the 2000 Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize and is a recipient of a Serpent Source Foundation For Women Artists Grant.

Born and raised in Nairobi, Kenya, Shailja read Economics and Politics at the University of York, England, and then trained as a chartered accountant in London. She is a certified yoga teacher who has taught internationally. She currently lives in San Francisco.