Manisha Sharma

Manisha Sharma is a winner of the Causeway Lit Poetry Award, a semifinalist for the Iron Horse Literary Review Poetry Chapbook contest, and is shortlisted for the Laureate Prize. Her fiction is longlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize, a finalist for the 2025 Cream City Review Fiction Contest, a semifinalist for The American Short(er) Fiction Contest, the first prize winner from UC Davis’s Greenbelt Review, and a runner-up for the Virginia Tech Fiction Prize. An Alfred Knobler Scholar, she received an MFA in fiction from Virginia Tech and a PhD in literature from India. Her poems appear in Arts & Letters, Puerto Del Sol, Madison Review, Fourth River, Amethyst Review, TAB, Choice Words Anthology, and elsewhere. Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Vermont Studio Center, and the AWP writer-to-writer program in poetry have supported her writing.

Born in India, she is an Assistant Teaching Professor of English at Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa.