Dr. Anita Nahal Arya, is an educator and writer. She has worked in higher education, both in teaching and administration, at various universities for over thirty years. She's been a Fulbright scholar and an NEH fellowship awardee among other laurels in her academic career. She has published, presented papers and seminars, and created numerous workshops in her discipline of history.
On the creative side, Anita is a poet, novelist, flash fictionist, children's book writer and short film maker. Anita has 17 books published: one novel, five poetry collections, one of flash fiction, four books for children, and six edited poetry anthologies. In the last two years she also released two very short films under 4 minutes each.
In May 2026 Anita's poem appeared in the prestigious Poem-A-Day by the Academy of American Poets. Anita was a finalist for the Fairfax Poet Laureate, 2024.
Nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize (22, 23), Anita won the Nissim Prize for Excellence in Literature for her poetry-prose novel, drenched thoughts in 2024. Anita was a finalist for the Tagore Literary Prize in 2023 for her fourth ekphrastic prose poetry collection, Kisses at the espresso bar (Kelsay, 2022). Her third prose poetry collection, What’s wrong with us Kali women? (Kelsay, 2021), was nominated by Cyril Dabydeen, poet laureate emeritus, Ottawa, Canada, as the best poetry book, 2021, for British Ars Notoria and is mandatory reading in a multicultural society course at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. Anita's latest book is, Animals-Prose poems on sentiency, decency and indecency (Kelsay, 2025) which focusses on the mistreatment of animals.
Anita’s poems have appeared in numerous journals in the US, UK, Asia, and Australia and anthologized in many collections, including including The Polaris Trilogy (24), The Best Asian Poetry (21-22), Yearbook of Indian Poetry in English (2021, 24-25) and Twenty Contemporary Indian English Poets, the latter released by India’s Academy of Letters—the Sahitya Akademi, 2023. Eleven of Anita's books are available at the Library of Congress. Her poems are also housed at Stanford University’s Digital Humanities Initiative. One of her poems, “Hold on baby, we'll soon be home,” was included as part of a video produced by Doordarshan TV, Kolkata, India. Anita also appears in the 2025 Springer's Encyclopedia and Dictionary of Diasporic Indian English Writing.
Recently Anita ventured into short filmmaking on her poems, and both her super short films--under 3 1/2 minutes each--"Unshaming a period," and "Clubs, my sinful dance muse," have won awards at the AltFF Alternative Film Festival-Canada, Five Continents International Film Festival-Venezuela, Sundarban International Film Festival, India and at the Asian International Filmfare Festival, India. Anita is the former secretary of the Montgomery Chapter, Maryland Writers Association, and former editor of the newsletter, Poetry Society of Virginia. She is an active member of the Northern Virginia Writers Club and the Poetry Society of Virginia. Anita is the daughter of Sahitya Akademi award-winning Indian novelist and professor, Late Dr. Chaman Nahal, and educationist Late Dr. Sudarshna Nahal. She teaches at a university in Washington DC.
