'Itemizing my Identity' nominated for a Pushcart Prize, 2020.

There was a summer when big bandicoots took over. The same summer they took over you said we were better together, the summer we lived together, the summer we bought a hamster, the summer I wore my cheap metal washer, my engagement ring...

"The artists of the 19th century often came alive for me in my grandmother’s living room. Still, I spent many hours captivated by the artists my grandmother had tried..."

Rhea Dhanbhoora on Writing about Identity in the Parsi Zoroastrian Diaspora

"I was slowly realizing it was important for my identity to inform my work; in no small part because so little of it informed my reading." Creative Nonfiction: Writing About People Like Me by Rhea Dhanbhoora

Announcing our new board members! Disruptors 2020, clockwise from top L: Tom Pyun, Anna Allen, Rhea Dhanbhoora, and Kevin Dublin.

Learning to say goodbye to my first car is also, at least for the moment, about saying goodbye to the city I grew up in and the people and experiences that shaped me...

Sometimes when I am half asleep, I curl my toes, twist my ankle, and stretch my leg till I can feel it from hip to toe. I do this often, waiting till I can feel any stretch, poke, twinge, twang…hoping none turn into spasms, aches, pains, throbs…

Capsule Stories Autumn 2020 Edition: Burning Up Featuring autumnal poems and prose by emerging and established writers, Capsule Stories Autumn 2020 Edition explores the theme Burning Up. POETRY “Itemizing My Identity,” “Collective Shame,” and “In Diaspora” by Rhea Dhanbhoora

I spent weeks looking for my sister the second time she ran away, then the day I found her, I wished I hadn't. It was on a Friday after work, I’d been passing by the church we used to go to with our mother who wasn't Catholic but liked the services, and the priest waved me down, saying a woman who looked like my sister had been bleeding over the pews. I’d made such an effort to forget about her this time, what I really wanted to do was leave her behind, kneeling there in whatever vain appeal...

Welcome to Season 2 of Blight: Stories in the Key of Decay and Repair. A series of episodes on confronting our uncertain future in the time of the COVID19 Virus, through essay, interview, storytelling and song. Episode 3: Planes Come In features host Sean Williamson on worry and runways, Adam Krause on the correlations between human stress on nature and pandemic, Jake Newborn from the Wisconsin Bike Fed, and Rhea Dhanbhoora on the life of sand. “Ease Your Soul, Chapman” by LeAnna Eden. Theme music by Shawn Stephany. Mix by Shane Olivo at Bobby Peru Recording

Crystal Radio Sessions Upstate is the new, local outpost of the NYC reading series, committed to showcasing the work of both established and emerging writers from our region. Come hear short stories by David Rabe, Ashley Mayne, Harris Lahti, Courtney Maum and Rhea Dhanbhoora, read by AOH audience favorite actors. Crystal Radio believes in the power of the spoken word and is devoted to transmitting compelling literary expression through the ether.

They can't book the baug because they're from a mixed family and the husband hasn't had his Navjote, but their eight-year-old wants to be like the other children in the colony, so they decide to have a ceremony on the terrace instead. She's more interested in gifts than prayers, she says, twirling desperately in her polka dot dress...

All the other images fade, but for the orange flags. Stiff nylon, fighting lazily against a balmy breeze. Orange. Always the strangest in the spectrum. A colour, a fruit, a flower — all rolled into one lazy word. As if there were no other way to describe the ghastly coalescence of red and yellow. A marriage of pigments, arranged quite conveniently between colours I have mixed feelings about. There was red, a reminder of period blood and bindis and rage and lipstick, muddled with yellow, a seemingly duplicitous shade that spits up images of Wordsworth’s daffodils as quickly as it will Eliot’s yellow fog.