About

Tara Lynn Masih grew up on Long Island’s north shore, in the small harbor town of East Northport. A bicultural author, she is the daughter of Lalit K. Masih (the first prominent Indian-American watercolorist) and Sandra Kolyer (who descends from many European ethnicities, including the first White Knight in Ireland). 

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Much of her writing is set within the framework of nature and place, a result of the years she spent outdoors in the woods, meadows, swamps and on the shores of Long Island Sound. She LOVES history, flowers, anything vintage, the beach, the marshes, chocolate, and family time. She now lives near the Twelve Mile Swamp in St. Augustine, Florida.

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PROFESSIONAL BIO

After graduating from C.W. Post College (major in English/minor in sociology, concentration in anthropology) she earned an MA in Writing and Publishing from Emerson College. Tara first worked as publisher’s assistant to Pym-Randall Press; as assistant editor to STORIES literary magazine; and as an editorial assistant in Little, Brown's college division. She later rose to book editor at Bedford Books/St. Martin’s Press, then freelanced for over 30 years as a book packager, copyeditor, and proofreader for such companies as Houghton Mifflin, Ballantine Books, Faber & Faber, and Harvard University Press.

 

Tara's published fiction, poetry, and essays (Confrontation, The Caribbean Writer, Hayden’​​s Ferry Review, The Baltimore Review, Pleiades, Five Points, Natural Bridge). Her essays have been read on NPR and translated into dance, and nonfiction articles appear in Electric Lit, Huffington Post, Psychology Today, and CRAFT.

 

She was a regular contributor to the Indian-American and Masala magazines and a recipient of the 2018 Albert Nelson Marquis Lifetime Achievement Award and the 2019 Inspirational Woman in Literature Award. She served on the advisory board for the Robert Frost Foundation and founded the annual Soul-Making Literary Competition’s Intercultural Essay Contest, sponsored by the San Francisco branch of the National League of American Pen Women. She is also a Founding Donor to the Harry Ransom Center's Flash Fiction Collection at the University of Texas at Austin, currently serves on the editorial board of Terrain.org (the world's first place-based online journal) and is a member of the Historical Novel Society.

 

 

​BRIEF BIO FOR MEDIA

Tara Lynn Masih is a National Jewish Book Award Finalist and winner of the Julia Ward Howe Award for Young Readers for her YA novel My Real Name Is Hanna. Her anthologies include The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction and The Chalk Circle: Intercultural Prizewinning Essays. How We Disappear: Novella & Stories, her latest collection, won a 2022 Florida Book Award. She founded the Intercultural Essay Prize in 2006 and the Best Small Fictions series in 2015.

 

Masih received a finalist fiction grant from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, an Inspirational Woman in Literature Award from AITL Media, and several national book awards including an IBPA Benjamin Franklin Award for her role as an editor.

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SELECT INTERVIEWS WITH TARA

Conversations Between Friends: Tara Lynn Masih, Stacy D. Flood, and Kim Chinquee, CRAFT literary magazine, May 31, 2023

 

Disappearing and Reappearing, Interview at LitReactor, by Steph Post, Sept. 12, 2022

 

Q&A with Tara Lynn Masih, by Deborah Kalb, Sept. 13, 2022

 

Writers Chat 56, by Shauna Gilligan, Sept. 9, 2022

 

An Interview with Tara Lynn Masih at Necessary Fiction, by Curtis Smith, June 2018

 

Group interview at The Writer magazine, “Writing Flash Fiction That Sells,” May 2017

 

Flash As One Deep Truth, 100 Word Story interview, 2015