Ravi Shankar is poet-in-residence at Central Connecticut State University and the founding editor of the international online journal of the arts Drunken Boat. His first book, Instrumentality, was published by Cherry Grove in 2004. His work has previously appeared or is forthcoming in such places as The Paris Review, Poets & Writers, Writer's Chronicle, The Iowa Review, Gulf Coast, The Massachusetts Review, Descant, Paris/Atlantic, Indiana Review, Western Humanities Review, Smartish Pace, and the anthologies Gentlemen: 15 Younger
American Male Poets, forthcoming from Stride Books UK in 2005, and Writing the Lines of Our Hands: A South Asian Poetry Anthology, forthcoming from Creative Arts Press in 2006. He has taught at Queens College, University of New Haven, and Columbia University, where he received his MFA in Poetry; has held residencies from the MacDowell Colony, the Ragdale Foundation, and the Atlantic Center for the Arts; and has been a commentator for National Public Radio. He reviews poetry for the Contemporary Poetry Review and is currently editing an anthology of South Asian, East Asian, and Middle Eastern poetry.