Author Feature: Roohi Choudhry, with Neema Avashia & Celeste Ng

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Join authors Roohi Choudhry, Celeste Ng & Neema Avashia in celebration of Choudhry’s debut novel, Outside Women, with an evening of readings & conversation on finding courage in sisterhood, defying silence across generations, & the revolutionary possibilities of standing together.

Outside Women - A century-spanning story of feminist resistance, radical kinship, and migrant solidarity set in South Africa, Pakistan and New York City.

Would you risk your own life to pursue justice for a stranger? Two migrant women—separated by geographies and generations—face this same devastating choice.

Lured away from her home in 1890s India, Sita is brought to South Africa as an indentured servant—one among millions funneled by the British to replace the recently abolished slave trade. One hundred years later, Hajra, a Pakistani scholar, is forced to flee her home in Peshawar after witnessing a violent act meant to target her. In New York City, she loses herself in academic research until she comes face-to-face with a photo of a laughing, defiant young woman brandishing a banner in protest. Inexorably drawn to this woman, Hajra travels to South Africa to learn more and unknowingly traces Sita's path.

With raw imagery and rich sensory detail, Roohi Choudhry's incandescent debut novel Outside Women intertwines the narratives of two women painfully yet valiantly carving their existences outside of patriarchal and colonial spaces as they search for kinship and strength in solidarity.

(Most Anticipated Feminist Books of 2025. University Press of Kentucky, Published March 25, 2025. )

Roohi Choudhry was born in Pakistan, grew up in southern Africa, and now calls Brooklyn, NY, home. She holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Michigan, and was awarded a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship. She has worked as a researcher in criminal justice reform and public health, wrote for the United Nations, and facilitates creative writing workshops for community organizations.

Neema Avashia is the daughter of Indian immigrants, and was born and raised in southern West Virginia. She has been an educator and activist in the Boston Public Schools since 2003, and was named a City of Boston Educator of the Year in 2013. Her first book, Another Appalachia: Coming Up Queer and Indian in a Mountain Place, was published by West Virginia University Press in March 2022. It has been called “A timely collection that begins to fill the gap in literature focused mainly on the white male experience” by Ms. Magazine, and “A graceful exploration of identity, community, and contradictions,” by Scalawag. The book was named Best LGBTQ Memoir of 2022 by BookRiot, was one of the New York Public Library’s Best Books of 2022, and was a finalist for the New England Book Award, the Weatherford Award, and a Lambda Literary Award. She lives in Boston with her partner, Laura, and her daughter, Kahani.

Celeste Ng grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Shaker Heights, Ohio. She graduated from Harvard University and earned an MFA from the University of Michigan (now the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan). Ng is the author of three novels, Everything I Never Told You, Little Fires Everywhere, and Our Missing Hearts. Her fiction and essays have appeared in the New York Times, The Guardian, and many other publications, and she is a recipient of the Pushcart Prize, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a Guggenheim Fellowship, among other honors.

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