Official Bio

Keya Mitra is an award-winning writer and Professor of Creative Writing and Literature at Pacific University. Her essay “Almost Born,” published in The Missouri Review’s Winter 2024 issue, won the 2024 Perkoff Prize in Nonfiction and has been awarded a Pushcart Prize, with publication forthcoming in the 2026 Pushcart Prize Anthology.

Furthermore, her essay “Bruised and Glorious” won the 2024 Prairie Schooner Summer Nonfiction Prize, selected by judge Safiya Sinclair and is forthcoming in the spring issue. Other essays from her memoir-in-essays, Almost Born, have received national recognition as well: “South on Sisters” was runner-up for the 2021 Witness Literary Awards in Nonfiction and published in their spring issue. Additional essays have been named finalists for the 2021 Iowa Review Contest, the 2024 Narrative Magazine Fall Story Contest, the 2021 Disquiet International Literary Prize, the 2024 Missouri Review's Jeffrey E. Smith Editors' Prize, the 2025 Arts & Letters Susan Atefat Prize for Creative Nonfiction, and the 2024 New Letters Conger Beasley Award.

She is also the recipient of a 2025 Tennessee Williams Scholarship in Nonfiction from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference—her second such honor following a fiction scholarship in 2021.

Mitra’s short story collection, Bad Babies, was a finalist for the 2024–2025 Iowa Short Fiction Award, the 2024 AWP Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction, and the 2024 Prairie Schooner Raz-Shumaker Book Prize. Previous versions were shortlisted for the Bakeless Prize, the Flannery O’Connor Award, Dzanc Books’ Diverse Voices Prize, and the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction.

Her fiction has appeared in The Kenyon Review (twice), Best New American Voices, The Bennington Review, The Southwest Review, The Bellevue Literary Review, Arts & Letters, and many other journals. Her short stories have won the 2021 Tobias Wolff Award for Fiction and earned a Best American Short Stories Notable in 2018.

She holds an MFA and PhD from the University of Houston’s Creative Writing Program and spent a year in India on a Fulbright grant. In 2022, she received the Arnold L. Graves and Lois S. Graves Award in the Humanities for her research in Meghalaya, India, which supported the writing of her novel, Immigrant Delay Disease—a finalist for the 2021 PEN Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction.

Born with a distinctive birthmark in the center of her forehead and raised in a mostly white suburb in Texas—Keya weathered racism as a kid. But the same skin that marked her for bullying cast her for admiration on family trips to India where strangers stopped her on the street to celebrate her “auspicious third eye.”

The experience inspired an exploration of race and culture, intergenerational bonds between Indian and Indian-American women, and empathy that has animated much of her writing and professional career. Career highlights include

  • PhD and MFA from the University of Houston’s creative writing program

  • 2008 Fulbright Scholarship

  • Assistant Professor at Gonzaga University

  • Full Professor at Pacific University

It’s pronounced KAY-ah MITT-ra.

She fell off a mountain —then the story began

“Fell off a mountain” isn’t a cutesy turn of phrase. It’s a harrowing story of loss, head trauma, and spiritual endurance. (See South on Sisters, 2021 Witness Magazine Literary Awards Runner-Up.)

Walking the 500-mile Camino Santiago — twice

During her recovery, her interest in hiking became a way of life. She practices gratitude on her long daily walks through the hills around Portland, Oregon. Two years after a brain operation for Chiari Malformation, Keya hiked 400 miles of Spain’s Camino de Santiago and returned in the summer of 2022 to hike all 500 miles, with the support of an Elise Elliott grant, and work on Almost Born, her book-length memoir about chronic illness, individual and collective trauma, movement therapy, and power of communal healing.

In 2023, she completed her third Camino de Santiago—this time hiking the Camino de Santiago de la Costa in Portugal (The Portuguese Litoral Route). She even returned to conquer the scene of the accident, the rugged, 10k-foot summit of South Sisters Mountain—twice.

Publications

Fiction

  • The Missouri Review “Almost Born” (2024)

  • The Bennington Review “Immigration Delay Disease” (2021)

  • Moss  “The Thin Place” (Spring 2018)

  • The Bennington Review “My Child of Stone” (Fall/Winter 2016)

  • The Kenyon Review “The Sacred Gifts of Cows and Cheetahs” (Winter 2015)

  • Aster(ix) “Eternal Pursuit of the Whale’s Song” (Summer 2016) 

  • Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies “The Perfect Eggplant” (Fall 2015)

  • Arts & Letters “Majormama” (Spring 2015)

  • Bellevue Literary Review Through NYU’s Department of Medicine “The Magnificent Purr” (Fall 2014)

  • Southwest Review “Antiques Anonymous” (Summer 2014)

  • Slush Pile  “The Unmourned” (Summer 2014)

  • The Kenyon Review’s Weekend Reads  Reprint of “A Family Matter” from 2011 print edition (2014)

  • The Kenyon Review “A Family Matter” (Fall 2011)

  • Best New American Voices 2007 “Pompeii Recreated”

  • Torpedo “A Man of Many Possibilities” (2008)

  • Event “Operation Saving Suma” (2006)

  • Fourteen Hills “An Elegy to Road Kill” (2006)

  • Confrontation “The Outage” (2006)

  • Ontario Review “Pompeii Recreated”  (2005)

  • Orchid “Tips on Pulling off the Graceful Death”  (2005)

Non-fiction

  • Witness Magazine “South on Sisters” (Spring 2021)

  • The Afghan Women’s Project Newsletter  “AWWP and the Power of One Woman’s Voice”  

  • Charter Magazine “A Classless Haven”

  • Unity Multicultural Education Center Newsletter “A Subtle but Critical Diversity”

  • Writers in the Schools Newsletter “A Child’s Voice in India”

  • American Book Review Review: Christina Milletti’s “The Religious and Other Fictions”

  • American Book Review  Review: Haruki Murakami’s “After Dark”

  • Gulf Coast“This is Where I Falter, This is Where I Lose Myself.”

Poetry

  • Travel Portland: Portland as Poetry Zine “Lower MacLeay Trail”