Shastri Akella worked with a street-theater troupe and at Google for five years and then earned his MFA in fiction at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His works have appeared in Hypothetical Review, The Common, The Rumpus, &Now (Paris edition), Danse Macabre, the Oxford Bookstore e-Author longlist, and The Hindu. His novel, a queer love story about an English musician and an Indian street-theater actor set in 1970s postcolonial India, deals with issues of body shame, gender fluidity, and guilt.