Vandana Nair w/ Renee Simms, THE WEDDING

Vandana Nair discusses her novel The Wedding (Santa Fe Writing Project) alongside Renee Simms, educator and author of Meet Behind Mars. Full of sharp wit, familial drama, cultural clashes, and unexpected encounters, The Wedding explores the complexities of tradition and modernity, and the universal search for love and belonging in a time of transition and turmoil.

Dr. Ahilya Kapoor dreads heading to her hometown in India for the lavish wedding of Radhika, her young cousin, who’ s captured the bachelor of the season. Entangled between two worlds, Ahilya's independent career as an epidemiologist for the WHO causes constant friction with her family’ s desire for her to “settle down and marry.”

During the festivities, Ahilya finds herself drawn to a handsome cardiologist from London. She envisages the possibility of a future that weaves her two worlds in harmony. But, just as things start going well, a mysterious illness sweeps through the gathering and Ahilya is wrapped up in events that will change everyone’ s lives.

Vandana Nair grew up in India, believing that relationships need to be nurtured from their roots. Living away from her birth country has given her the essential distance to mine stories, essays and other forms from her cultural home and heritage. Learning across geographies have enabled her to complete her undergraduate degree in India, work as a freelance writer, and attain an MFA from the Rainier Writing Workshop in Fiction. Nair's book reviews of translated texts from India have appeared in Exchanges: Journal of Literary Translation, The University of Iowa. Nair’s novel, The Wedding, is a summer release from Santa Fe Writer’s Project in June 2026. Find her at nairvandana.com.

Renee Simms' writing has appeared in Salon, Guernica, Oxford American, The Southwest Review, The Los Angeles Times, and elsewhere. Her debut story collection Meet Behind Mars (Wayne State University Press) was a Foreword Indies finalist for Short Stories, featured on NPR and the National Book Critics Circle blog, and was listed by The Root as one of 28 brilliant books by Black authors in 2018. She has a memoir and a novel forthcoming with Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Renee teaches in the low residency MFA program at Pacific Lutheran University and is an Associate Professor of African American Studies at University of Puget Sound.