Faculty

Rajpreet Heir is an Indian from Indianapolis, Indiana. Her parents are from the Midlands of England and her grandparents are from rural farming villages in Punjab, India. In her writing, she explores how to make sense of her identity in a non-essentialist way while still grappling with the politics of colonialism and multiple layers of migration. Her current book project, Indian in Indiana, builds on her undergraduate and graduate school thesis. One chapter is forthcoming in A Flame Called Indiana: Contemporary Hoosier Writing, an Indiana University Press anthology, and another appeared in Good Girls Marry Doctors: An Anthology of South Asian American Daughters on Obedience and Rebellion.

She’s been using the same material and awareness of being an Indian in Indiana to do public-facing pieces which have appeared in Teen Vogue, The Best of Brevity anthology, Literary Hub, The Washington Post, and more. Her Bend It Like Beckham personal essay in The Atlantic caught the attention of On Being Studios and they featured her on their “This Movie Changed Me” podcast. Also, The New York Times asked her to transform a written essay about racism she experienced on the subway into a video essay, and it went viral, with additional coverage from Yahoo, HuffPost, and The Times of India. In this public-facing work, she addresses her identity and the urgency of confronting racial injustice and misogyny while also reflecting on long-standing themes she explores in her manuscript—the myth of Midwestern hospitality, the difficulty of speaking up, injustice, and feeling like an outlier.

She received her B.A. in English Writing from DePauw University and her M.F.A. in Creative Nonfiction from George Mason University. Before this role, she worked for Getty Images and TED Conferences in New York City.  

COURSES TAUGHT

• Personal Essay
• Writing for the Workplace
• Creative Nonfiction
• Humor Writing
• Academic Writing
• Writers' Practice
• Visiting Writers' Workshop

Media 

• "This Movie Changed Me," On Being Studios, 2018
• "When Your Commute Includes 'You Don't Belong in This Country,'" The New York Times, 2017

Publications

• "Caves" A Flame Called Indiana: Contemporary Hoosier Writing, 2023
• Contributor, The Writer's Hustle: A Professional Guide to the Creativity, Discipline, Humility, and Grit Every Writer Needs to Flourish, Bloomsbury 2022
• "Like Constance Wu, These Three Other Memoirists Want More" The New York Times, 2022
• "Gentlemen, Start Your Engines" The Rumpus, 2022
• "A Day in the Life of a Finance Bro" Little Old Lady Comedy, 2022
• "Seeking Fortune Elsewhere" The Harvard Review, 2022
• "Searching for ways to understand and survive 'Girlhood'" The Boston Globe, 2021
• "The Crossroads of America" Essay Daily, 2021
• "Sejal Shah's This is One Way to Dance," The Harvard Review, 2020
• "An Indian in Yoga Class: Finding Imbalance," Best of Brevity anthology, 2020
• "An Indian in Yoga Class: Finding Imbalance," Brevity, 2019
• "I'm So Jealous You Get To Read 'Anita and Me' by Meera Syal For the First Time," Bustle, 2019
• "Timothy Devevi's Freak Kingdom," The Rupture, 2019
• "Meghan Markle's Trooping the Colour Appearance on the Buckingham Palace Balcony Matters," Teen Vogue, 2018
• "Race at the Race: Being Indian-American at the Indianapolis 500," Lit Hub, 2017
• "A Guy on the Subway Told Me I Didn't Belong in This Country and I Told the Whole World About it," Cosmopolitan, 2017
• "Bend It Like Beckham and the Art of Balancing Cultures," The Atlantic, 2017
• "How Miss Cleo taught me to turn racial stereotypes inside out," The Washington Post, 2016
• "Someday Never Comes," Good Girls Marry Doctors: An Anthology of South Asian American Daughters on Obedience and Rebellion, 2016

Media Writing

• "Get to Know Melē, A New Product Line Created for Melanin-Rich Skin" People, 2021
• "New Must-Try Products For Melanin-Rich Skin" InStyle, 2021
• "Skincare as Self-Care" People en Español, 2021
• "Easy as ACB: Adopting Conscious Beauty" Real Simple, 2021
• "Less is More: Clean Ingredients and Sustainably Packaged Skincare" InStyle, 2021
• "The bold and brilliant conference shorts from TEDWomen 2019," TED Blog, 2019
• "Reading list: 23 female TED speakers tell us about the books that shaped them," TED Ideas Blog, 2018
• "10 great films from female directors that you need to stream right now," TED Ideas Blog, 2018

AWP PANELS

• "The Loneliness of the Slow Essayist: On writing books that take forever" (2024)
• "We can’t all marry rich: Teaching creative writing students professional skills" (2024)
• "Mentoring Across Race: Practices to Support BIPOC Students and Writers" (2023) 
• “Navigating Layered Identities in Creative Nonfiction” (2022)
• "The Drama of Writing Trauma: Female Essayists on Tackling the Tough Topics” (2020)
• “Mining the Everyday: Using Real Life Experiences as Creative Research” (2019)
• “A Woman’s Rites of Passage” (2019)

STUDENT WORK (FROM MY CLASSES) I'VE HELPED PUBLISH

• "Searching for Home in “Cat and Bird” (2024) 
• "I Hate Gen Z Pop Stars, Does That Make Me a Generation Traitor?" (2023)
• "No One Cares That You're a Leap Frog Baby" (2023)
• "Finish Him!" (2022)
• "An Open Letter to the Person Who Emailed Me Ten Years Ago" (2022)
• "An Open Letter to My Dad" (2022)

website

https://www.rajpreetheir.com