Bio
Manisha Sharma is an Assistant Professor of Teaching in the English Department at Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa.
Sharma’s fiction is a finalist for the Cream City Review Summer Fiction Contest in 2025, 2020, a semifinalist for the American Short(er) Fiction Contest, longlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize, a Best New American Voices Nominee, a runner-up for the Virginia Tech Fiction Prize, and a winner of the Fiction Prize by Greenbelt Review from UC Davis. She is a recipient of residencies from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, a work-study scholarship from the Vermont Studio Center, and an AWP writer-to-writer program mentee. Her fiction and poetry appear in The Common, The Greenbelt Review, Arts & Letters, Puerto Del Sol, The Madison Review, Fourth River, The Amethyst Review, TAB, and Choice Words Anthology. She has an MFA from Virginia Tech and a Ph.D. from India.
Details about her work can be found at http://www.manisha-sharma.com/
Courses
ENGL 3020 Business Communication Honors & Regular, Spring 2024
ENGL 3040 Creative Writing: Fiction, Spring 2024
ENGL 3060 Writing Poetry, Fall, Spring 2023
ENGL 3020 Business Communication (Online), Fall 2023
ENGL 2500 Written, Oral, Visual, and Electronic Communication (Honors, Innovation and Entrepreneurship), 2021-2023, 2024
Research Areas of Interest
- Sex Selection in India (Poetry, Fiction, Interdisciplinary)
- Gender Imbalance (Poetry, Fiction, Interdisciplinary)
- Women & Creativity (Poetry, Fiction, Literature)
- Role of Relaxation in Creativity & Writing (Evidence-based practical course, across all genres)
- Gen Z and Stress, Anxiety (Across all genres)
- Representing Psychosomatic illnesses in Writing (Poetry, Fiction, Non-Fiction, Literature)
Selected Publications
Amethyst Review, “…समत्वं योग उच्यते …samatvam yoga ucyate (Bhagavad Gita, Chapter 2, Verse 48) Equilibrium is yoga, ” 11 Nov. 2022
Literary Mama, “I had a Boy,” Spring 2021
Arts & Letters, “The Vanishing Girls…” , “Discerning Sex Selection,” Spring 2021 print
The Madison Review, “Advice,” 2020
The Fourth River, “Call for Artifacts….2099,” March 2020
Choice Words: Writers on Abortion, 2020
Literary Hub “What It Mean to Anthologize the Literature of Abortion,” 2022
Innovation Design Education Issue “Empty Bowls: Teaching Students Leadership, Empathy and Social Responsibility,” (pp. 70) Article, 2019 print
Installations
“The Vanishing”, Collaborative Poetry, Sound & Art Installation (2014-2016)
Locations: Brisbane, Sydney, Australia; Virginia Tech, USA; Jaipur, Bengaluru, India Description: Interdisciplinary, collaborative art-sound installation creating awareness through data-driven storytelling, recorded poems, physical artifacts, and Arduino based sensing and playback mechanism
Recent Honors & Awards
CyThanks Note Spring 25
Invited Panelist Choice Words Anthology, Brooklyn Public Library, April 2024
Current Research Projects
Sharma is working on a poetry collection centered around her experiences with epilepsy.