Shubha Sunder is a 2025 Whiting Award winner and the author of Optional Practical Training, an immigrant novel in conversations that won the New American Voices Award and was a finalist for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. Her first book, Boomtown Girl, a short story collection set in her hometown of Bangalore, India, won the 2021 St. Lawrence Book Award. She currently teaches in the creative writing MFA program at UMass Boston.
