Aishvarya Arora

This is a black and white photo of Aishvarya Arora, a South Asian person with short, black curly hair, seen from the shoulders up, wearing a striped shirt and a thick chain necklace standing on a sidewalk with trees in the background.

Photo by Bridget Huh

Aishvarya Arora was born in Hanumangarh, India and is a poet, teaching artist, and cultural organizer from Queens, New York. They’re the author of Mr. Time (Gold Line Press, 2026), selected by Diannelly Antigua as winner of the Gold Line Press Poetry Contest. Their writing has appeared in, or is forthcoming from, The Kenyon Review, Gulf Coast, Poetry Northwest, and Foglifter, among other publications.

Arora earned their MFA from Cornell University, where they were awarded the Robert Chasen Memorial Poetry Prize, the George Harmon Coxe Poetry Prize, and the Migrations Creative Writing Award. They’ve received additional support from the Fulbright Program, Brew & Forge, Tupelo Press’s Merrill Family Scholarship, and the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, where they were a Poetry Coalition fellow.

Currently, they live in Ithaca, New York, where they are a lecturer in creative writing at Cornell University and create poetry ephemera through their micropress, Lavender Codex.