SJ (Sinduja Sathiyaseelan) Sindu is a Tamil diaspora author and educator who was born in Sri Lanka and raised in Massachusetts. She earned an MA in English (Creative Writing) from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and a PhD in English and Creative Writing from Florida State University. Sindu was an assistant professor in the English Department of the University of Toronto Scarborough for a few years in the early 2020s. Sindu now teaches at Virginia Commonwealth University.
Fiction
Blue-Skinned Gods
New York: Soho Press, 2021.
PS3619.I5688 B58 2021
Publisher’s Synopsis (From its website)
In Tamil Nadu, India, a boy is born with blue skin. His father sets up an ashram, and the family makes a living off of the pilgrims who seek the child’s blessings and miracles, believing young Kalki to be the tenth human incarnation of the Hindu god Vishnu. In Kalki’s tenth year, he is confronted with three trials that will test his power and prove his divine status and, his father tells him, spread his fame worldwide. While he seems to pass them, Kalki begins to question his divinity.
Over the next decade, his family unravels, and every relationship he relied on—father, mother, aunt, uncle, cousin—starts falling apart. Traveling from India to the underground rock scene of New York City, Blue-Skinned Gods explores ethnic, gender, and sexual identities, and spans continents and faiths, in an expansive and heartfelt look at the need for belief in our globally interconnected world.
Fiction (Short stories)
The Goth House Experiment and Other Stories
Soho Press, 2023.
Publisher’s Synopsis (From its website)
In “Dark Academia and the Lesbian Masterdoc,” a millennial English professor finds viral fame on TikTok, but her newfound notoriety could wreck her already unstable life. In “Patriots’ Day,” a man having an affair finds himself caught up in larger currents of anti-Asian violence. Throughout the collection, an array of loners and artists—a young poet haunted by the ghost of Oscar Wilde, a home brewer and wife during lockdown, a boy with wings—struggle for connection and fulfillment in a world battered by the pandemic and reactionary politics. A daring writer with limitless range, SJ Sindu can depict shocking cruelty as readily as small moments of queer joy. The Goth House Experiment is a startling and very funny collection by one of America’s most exciting young voices.
Fiction
Marriage of a Thousand Lies
New York: Soho Press, 2017.
PS3619.I5688 M37 2017
Publisher’s Synopsis (From its website)
Lucky and her husband, Krishna, are gay. They present an illusion of marital bliss to their conservative Sri Lankan–American families, while each dates on the side. It’s not ideal, but for Lucky, it seems to be working. But when Lucky’s grandmother has a nasty fall, Lucky returns to her childhood home and unexpectedly reconnects with her former best friend and first lover, Nisha, who is preparing for her own arranged wedding with a man she’s never met. As the connection between the two women is rekindled, Lucky tries to save Nisha from entering a marriage based on a lie. But does Nisha really want to be saved? And is Lucky willing to leave the life she’s known behind?
A necessary and beautiful addition to both the Sri Lankan-American and LGBTQ canons, SJ Sindu’s debut novel, Marriage of a Thousand Lies, offers a moving and sharply rendered exploration of friendship, family, love, and loss.
Awards and Honours
2018 Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction (Publishing Triangle) (Winner)
2018 Golden Crown Literary Society Award for Debut Fiction
2018 Stonewall Honor Books in Literature (American Library Association)
2018 Lambda Literary Awards (Lesbian Fiction category) (Finalist)
2018 VCU (Virginia Commonwealth University) First Novelist Award (Finalist)
Fiction (Juvenile, Graphic novel)
Shakti: A Graphic Novel
Illustrated by Nabi H. Ali.
New York: HarperAlley, 2023.
Publisher’s Synopsis
Shakti is used to being the new girl at school. She and her two moms have moved more times than she can count. With her unborn baby brother on the way, Shakti hopes her family has found their forever home in Amherst, Massachusetts, and that she can finally make friends.
On her first day of seventh grade, she meets Xi and they bond over their shared passion for manga (and pizza with mayo). But the three meanest girls in school—Harini, Emily, and Kelly (aka “HEK”)—are determined to make life miserable for Shakti and her new friends.
When Shakti and Xi discover HEK casting spells in the woods, they fear what might happen to the other kids at school. Drawing on ancient Indian magic, Shakti seeks the aid of Durga Ma to stop HEK. But instead, Shakti accidentally conjures Kali Ma, the destroyer—Durga Ma’s dangerous twin. Kali Ma punishes HEK by transforming them into monsters and curses the entire town. As more and more people begin to fall ill, including Shakti’s mom, will Shakti be able to harness her own strength, power, and empathy to save those she loves—and put an end to all the hate?
Fiction (Juvenile, Graphic novel)
Tall Water: A Graphic Novel
Illustrated by Dion MBD.
New York: HarperAlley, 2025.
Publisher’s Synopsis
Ever since she turned sixteen, Nimmi has wanted to see her mother. Though she has a loving but overprotective father and a budding relationship, she yearns to travel to Sri Lanka to confront the mother who refused to leave the island during a war, not even for Nimmi’s sake. Her father is going back for the first time as a reporter on assignment, but he refuses to take her, deeming Sri Lanka too dangerous.
But then Nimmi’s mother appears to her in a dream, asking her to come find her, and Nimmi knows she must go. Her father is livid when he sees her at baggage claim, but by then it’s too late, and he reluctantly agrees to help Nimmi make contact with her mother. In Sri Lanka, Nimmi tags along with her father and his guide, past checkpoints and armed soldiers and increasing hints of the war that rages there.
However, the day after Christmas, disaster strikes and a tsunami ravages the island. Stranded amid the devastation and destruction, can Nimmi reunite with her mother? Through her journey, Nimmi might just learn that the person she most needed to find was herself.
Mixed Forms (Chapbook)
Dominant Genes
Black Lawrence Press, 2022.
Publisher’s Synopsis (From its website)
Dominant Genes, the new hybrid collection from Stonewall Honor author and Lambda Literary Award finalist SJ Sindu, is equal parts power and astonishing beauty, tenderness and shimmering anger, poetry and lyric essays interwoven in a gorgeous exploration of family, heritage, and the construction of nonbinary and queer identities. “We learn our anger through osmosis,” Sindu writes of the inherited rage of South Asian women, “or maybe it’s in the breast milk, spreading through our veins long before we learn how to look only at the floor and walk without showing our ankles.”
There is hope in this collection, and the lead weight of expectation, and warm moments of empathy too. Thematically linked and stylistically nimble, Sindu’s pieces play with the fragmentary nature of memory and identity, her speakers traversing with intelligence and compassion the complexities of mental health, love, and pressurized relationships with the people closest to us—those who love us intensely, even when they understand us the least.
Awards and Honours
2020 Black River Chapbook Competition (Winner)
Mixed forms (Chapbook)
I Once Met You But Your Were Dead
Split Lip Press, 2016.
Publisher’s Synopsis (From its website)
I Once Met You But You Were Dead is a hybrid chapbook of fiction and nonfiction that juxtaposes girlhood, womanhood, and cultural gender politics with war and violence
Awards and Honours
2016 Turnbuckle Chapbook Contest (Winner)
Links
SJ Sindu personal website
SJ Sindu’s Author’s note about the origins of Blue-Skinned Gods
Publisher Black Lawrence Press
Publisher Soho Press
Publisher Split Lip Press