Shivani Manghnani

Shivani Manghnani is an Indian American fiction writer and professor. Manghnani won the 2008 Hyphen Asian American Short Story Contest for her short story, "Playing The Sheik," which is also published in the Spring 2009 issue of Hyphen magazine,Issue No. 17, the "Family" Issue.

Manghnani was born and raised in Honolulu, Hawaii. She graduated from the Punahou School for high school, received her bachelor's degree in English Language and Literature/Letters with a Creative Writing concentration from Brown University in 1999, and a MFA (Master of Fine Arts) in Fiction Writing from Columbia University in 2005. At Brown University, Manghnani also wrote a novella entitled The Fruit Seller (1999).

Manghnani has been a resident at the MacDowell Colony, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and the Instituto Sacatar in Bahia, Brazil, and also received a fellowship from the Urban Artist Initiative/NYC Grant Program. She has also taught as an Adjunct Instructor of English at the City University of New York (where she became a Certified Scorer for CUNY Assessment Test in Writing (CATW))and an Adjunct Faculty Member and Writing Tutor at St. Joseph's College. She has also worked as a Freelance Copywriter at Simon & Schuster, a Freelance Writer at Nella Media Group, a Vocabulary Activities Writer at Amplify Education, and a Copy Writer for Praakti Health. She has also taught at Hunter College.

Short stories

Manghnani's short story "Playing The Sheik" won the 2008 Hyphen Asian American Short Story Contest (or Asian American Short Story Contest) sponsored by Hyphen and the Asian American Writers' Workshop, the only national Pan-Asian American writing competition of its kind. The story is about an Indian American boy that lives in Hawaii named Rahi, who has a father that is an actor readying himself for a Hawaii Five-O-esque show entitled "Paradise Laws." The story is also published in the Spring 2009 issue of Hyphen magazine, the "Family" Issue. Manghani has stated that for the story, she drew on an incident from her Honolulu childhood and stated that her "father appeared on Hawaii Five-O way back in the day (and yes, he wore a headdress), and Jack Lord did come to our house". In her story, "she sought to depict the complexity of growing up in "'multicultural' Hawaii, where racism toward newer immigrant groups often comes from the 'local' Asian community."

In 2008, Manghnani also won the Amanda Davis Highwire Fiction Award from McSweeney's.

In 2009, Manghnani published her short story "House of Men" in the Boston Review. Manghani's short story "The Paying Guest" also won a "Honorable Mention" award for the John Gardner Memorial Prize in Fiction, which is published in the Summer 2005 issue (Volume 5, Issue No. 1) of Harpur Palate.

Manghnani's short story "More Precious than These Hands" also appears in the Asian American Writers' Workshop book ontours of the Heart: South Asians Map North America (1996). Furthermore, one of Manghnani's short stories entitled "Tsunami" was a finalist for a Glimmer Train "Family Matters" Short Story contest.

Other work

In 2015, Manghnani published a profile on author Hanya Yanagihara entitled "Letters From Home" in the September 10, 2015 issue of Flux Hawaii Magazine (the "Charm Issue").