Author Talk: Julie Choffel and Pallavi Sharma Dixit

ABOUT THE BOOKS

Edison is a Bollywood-style epic tale brimming with song and dance, action and comedy, love and pathos, and cameos by dozens of real Indian stars of yesterday and today—a hilariously entertaining masala film in the guise of literary fiction.

Along the way, we glean bits of Bollywood history and fall in love with an improbable cast of characters that inhabits Edison’s “Little India.” Edison is a wild, romantic, laugh-out-loud love letter to the Indian American community of Edison, New Jersey, where author Pallavi Dixit grew up.

The unlikely star of Edison is Prem Kumar, the hapless youngest son of a titan of New Delhi industry. Obsessed with Hindi movies—what the world calls Bollywood—he is uninterested in joining the family business or marrying the spear-wielding heiress chosen by his father. He runs away to chase his filmmaking dreams in America, but his plans are immediately derailed. Instead, he finds himself crashing on a mattress and working at an Exxon gas station in the Indian immigrant community of Edison, New Jersey.

Although life is not going according to script, Prem finds a happy rhythm in this bewildering setting. When the beautiful and ambitious Leena Engineer bursts onto the scene, she and her grocery store–owning father upend Prem’s short-term plan to do as little as possible, launching him on an epic adventure to make something of himself. Supported by an unruly cast of roommates, aunties, murderous yet orderly mobsters, and film stars at once glamorous and ludicrous, Prem test-drives the role of hero, and along the way, he witnesses around him the transformation of an ordinary suburb into a bustling "Little India."

Dear Wallace addresses the poet and insurance executive Wallace Stevens in an attempt to reconsider art, power, and creativity amid the demands of everyday responsibility.

Exploring relationships between modernism, motherhood, poetry, and privilege, the speaker of these poems puts her daily routines in dialogue with his. Curious, funny, and wry, Julie Choffel confronts Stevens as an unlikely peer who lived and wrote in the same city and weather as she does now, imagining a present-day conversation about the many ways creative practice is informed by social context. As we struggle to marry creative independence with our communal obligations, the questions in these poems are more urgent than ever. Stevens, a proxy for beauty, inventiveness, and legitimacy, becomes an audience for the ennui, anxiety, and politics of care that characterize another kind of writer’s life today.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Pallavi Sharma Dixit holds a BA and an MA (history) from the University of Pennsylvania and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She has been the recipient of grants and fellowships from the Jerome Foundation, the Minnesota State Arts Board, and others. She was a winner of the Asian American Writers Workshop’s Pages in Progress Prize and one of three winners of the First Pages Prize in fiction for Edison, her debut novel.

She has taught creative writing at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis, where she lives with her husband, two children, and their dog. She grew up in Edison and frequently visits the town, where her parents still reside.

Julie Choffel is a poet and educator. Her most recent book, Dear Wallace, won the Backwaters Prize in Poetry and was published in 2024 from The Backwaters Press, an imprint of the University of Nebraska Press.

She is also the author of The Hello Delay (Fordham University Press), selected by Mei-mei Berssenbrugge for the Poets Out Loud prize, as well as a handful of chapbooks: The Inevitable Return of What We Do Not Love (Finishing Line Press), The Chicories (Ethel Press), and Figures In a Surplus (Achiote Press). Her poems have appeared in many journals, including Tupelo Quarterly, ORION, Conduit, New American Writing, Posit, Denver Quarterly, and the tiny.

From 2017 to 2020, she served as the Poet Laureate of West Hartford, Connecticut, where she continues to curate readings and literary events for the Greater Hartford area. Julie teaches creative writing as an Assistant Professor at the University of Connecticut, and lives near Hartford with her partner and their three children.

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