Lopa Banerjee is an author, poet, editor and translator based in Dallas, Texas, USA. Her memoir "Thwarted Escape: An Immigrant's Wayward Journey" and her debut poetry collection "Let The Night Sing" have received honorary mentions in The Los Angeles Book Festival and New England Book Festival 2017 respectively. Her manuscript of ‘Thwarted Escape’ has also been First Place Category Winner at the Journey Awards 2014 hosted by Chanticleer Reviews and Media, USA. She also received The International Reuel Prize for Poetry in 2017 and The International Reuel Prize for Translation in 2016 (for "The Broken Home", her English translation of Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore's novella), both instituted by The Significant League, a literary group in Facebook. "The Broken Home and Other Stories", her translation of two novellas and six short stories of Tagore is now a book in paperback version, published by Authorspress. Her literary work has been published in many e-zines and anthologies based in the US and India, also in UK and Australia. She has also co-edited two fiction anthologies, "Defiant Dreams: Tales of Everyday Divas" and "Darkness There But Something More" and also co-edited an anthology of women poets "Cloudburst: The Womanly Deluge". A mother of two daughters, she is very passionate about the causes of gender-based violence and discrimination, and has been a featured poet/artist at Dark Moon Poetry, a Women-of-Color poetry and arts group. She is also a performing poet at Renegade Voices Collective, based in Fort Worth, Texas.
“Each time a woman stands up for herself without knowing it, possibly without claiming it, she stands up for all women.” Maya Angelou
Read her story here.