BALLOT - an event with authors Anjali Enjeti, Neema Avashia, & Anjali Duva

Harvard Book Store welcomes Anjali Enjeti— former attorney, journalist, activist, and election worker, and award-winning author of The Parted Earth and Southbound—for a discussion of her new book, Ballot. She will be joined in conversation by Neema Avasia—acclaimed author of Another Appalachia—and Anjali Mitter Duva—co-founder of Galiot Press, former fiction editor at Solstice Literary Magazine, and author of Faint Promise of Rain.

Ballot examines the psychological, cultural, and political significance of voting in an increasingly anti-voting climate. Armed with her personal experiences as a poll worker, electoral organizer, and activist, Anjali Enjeti unspools a timely narrative about the precarious state of the ballot during one of the most tumultuous political eras in US history, and recounts the astonishing events leading up to the 2024 presidential election.
Enjeti lays out the growing challenges for voters in battleground states, where rightwing legislatures have introduced staggering numbers of voter suppression bills and redrawn district lines, all to disenfranchise as many Black and other marginalized voters as possible. As her account of the history and stakes of election integrity shows, the aftershocks of the Capitol insurrection on January 6, 2021 have manifested most egregiously on the four corners of the ballot.

"An assured, forward-looking rumination on voting in the U.S. offers constructive ideas for the political left."—Kirkus Reviews

"It is so easy amidst so much of talk of voting to forget what it is to vote. What the right to vote means to you personally and to the country in which you live. Anjali Enjeti has written a moving and brilliant autobiography of her vote that intersects with the history of the right to vote, speaking all the while to the subtext of the times: that bound up in our vote is our lives, and what we mean to each other, our future and our past, our possibilities. I felt a renewed commitment to democracy, and I will reflect on how I didn’t know I needed that for some time. I want this book everywhere."—Alexander Chee, author of How to Write an Autobiographical Novel

"Anjali Enjeti makes an essential and timely case for voting as a tactic. She welcomes in both skeptics and believers to explain what’s at stake when we go to the ballot box and what happens when voting rights are curtailed. A necessary text at this point in human history, I hope that young people especially will read it and that elders will join them."—Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, author of The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred

Anjali Enjeti is the award-winning author of The Parted Earth and Southbound: Essays on Identity, Inheritance, and Social Change. Her third book, Ballot, describes voting and voting rights from her perspective as a Georgia voter, poll worker, and electoral organizer, who has volunteered for the campaigns of Jon Ossoff, Stacey Abrams, Reverend Raphael Warnock, and others. Her writing has also appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, Harper's Bazaar, and elsewhere. She teaches creative writing in the MFA programs at Antioch University in Los Angeles and Reinhardt University in Waleska, Georgia.

Neema Avashia is the daughter of Indian immigrants, and was born and raised in southern West Virginia. She has been an educator and activist in the Boston Public Schools since 2003, and was named a City of Boston Educator of the Year in 2013. Her first book, Another Appalachia: Coming Up Queer and Indian in a Mountain Place, was published by West Virginia University Press in March 2022. It was a finalist for the New England Book Award, the Weatherford Award, and a Lambda Literary Award. She lives in Boston with her partner, Laura, and her daughter, Kahani.

Anjali Mitter Duva is an Indian American writer, editor, and publisher who was raised in France. She is a co-founder of Galiot Press and a former fiction editor at Solstice Literary Magazine. The the author of the historical novel Faint Promise of Rain, she has been a finalist for a Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Fellowship. She co-founded and for ten years ran the Arlington Author Salon, a quarterly literary series, and is also a co-founder of the Indian kathak dance non-profit Chhandika. Anjali was educated at Brown University and MIT.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Harvard Book Store, 1256 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, United States

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