Ravi Shankar

Dr. Ravi Shankar (born 1975) is an American poet, editor, and former literature professor at Central Connecticut State University and City University of Hong Kong and Chairman of the Asia Pacific Writers & Translators (APWT). He is the founding editor of online literary journal Drunken Boat. He has been called "a diaspora icon" by The Hindu and "one of America's finest younger poets" by former Connecticut poet laureate Dick Allen. Career Shankar received his bachelor's degree from the University of Virginia, his M.F.A. in poetry from the Columbia University School of the Arts and his PhD as an international research fellow at the University of Sydney. He moved to Chester from Brooklyn, and joined the Central Connecticut State University (CCSU) as a faculty member in 2002. He was also a guest teacher of the masters program at Fairfield University. He was elected Chairman of the Connecticut Young Writers Trust in 2011. In 2014, he was promoted from the rank of associate professor to professor at CCSU. He also served as co-director of the creative writing minor at CCSU. He has appeared on PBS and on National Public Radio. He received the University-level Trustees Research Award as a faculty member at CSUS in 2009. In the same year, he also received a fellowship award from The Connecticut Commission on Culture and Tourism and Summer Literary Seminars fellowship to Kenya. He has taught around the world including at Wesleyan University Summer Writing Conference, City University of Hong Kong, Eastern Mediterranean University in Cyprus, Sun Yat Sen University in China and his poetry has been translated into over a dozen languages, including French, German, Spanish, Hindi, Italian, Bengali, Urdu, Tamil, Slovenian, Russian, Greek, Mandarin, and Japanese. In 1999, he founded Drunken Boat. As of 2018, he was a teacher at the New York Writers Workshop and City University of Hong Kong. He is Chairman of the Asia Pacific Writers & Translators Organization . and a Board Member of the New York Writers Workshop.