The Café Royal Cultural Foundation NYC has awarded a 2022 Winter Literature Grant to Sangamithra Iyer for her first book, Governing Bodies: A Catena.

Sangamithra Iyer is a writer, engineer, and environmental planner. She is the recipient of a Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant, a Pushcart Prize and an Aspen Summer Words Emerging Writer Fellowship. Sangamithra has volunteered for animal sanctuaries in North America and Africa, researched and documented the rise of factory farming globally, and worked in water supply protection for over a decade. She writes at the intersections of art and science and personal and planetary grief.

Her first book GOVERNING BODIES is forthcoming from Milkweed Editions opens with this declaration:

What you must understand is that when I tell you a story about my body, I cannot separate it from a story about water. And a story about water is also story about family. And a story about my family is rooted in a story about the earth. And when I tell you about the earth, I must tell you about elephants and chimpanzees, cows and chickens, coral and trees, monkeys and bees. What harms one body harms all bodies. Like tributaries to the same river, our stories are entwined.

Governing Bodies is a lyrical manifesto and ethical reckoning. In soil science, a catena is a series of soil layers down a hill slope.  Each is distinct but connected.  Governing Bodies acts as a catena, a chain of texts, linking a range of subjects from family history and ecological grief to the rights of animals and the memory of water.  

The book intertwines the story of Sangamithra’s paternal grandfather, who quit his job as a civil engineer in colonial Burma to become a water diviner and join the Freedom Movement in India, with her own journeys as a civil engineer, writer, and activist.

Spanning three generations and four continents, the book is set along waterbodies in Burma, India, Cameroon, Rwanda, France and the U.S. Water and animal histories are interwoven, as this book wrestles with how different bodies live with the legacy of historical harms (colonialism, vivisection, factory farming, genocide, environmental destruction).

This project probes histories found in bodies, families, libraries, and the lacunas of archives and is governed by a series of questions:  What does it mean to embody nonviolence in a society rooted in violence?  How do we reimagine our harmful relationships with the other beings with whom we share our world and disentangle ourselves from systems of harm?  How do we sit with the massive scale of planetary sorrow, and emerge with truth and compassion as our guides instead of despair?

Sangamithra’s writing has been published by The Kenyon Review, n+1, Creative Nonfiction, Hippocampus, and Newtown Literary and has been anthologized in several essay collections. She was a finalist for the Siskiyou Prize for New Environmental Literature and has received support from the Jerome and Camargo Foundations. She served as an editor of Satyamagazine, focused on animal advocacy, environmentalism, veganism, and social justice. Sangu holds a B.E. in Civil Engineering from The Cooper Union, an M.S. in Geotechnical Engineering from U.C. Berkeley, and an MFA in Creative Writing from Hunter College.

For more information on Sangamithra please visit her Twitter and website.