WRITING INSIGHT SESSIONS
IN SENSORIUM: NOTES FOR MY PEOPLE BY TANAÏS, WINNER OF THE 2022 KIRKUS PRIZE FOR NONFICTION
"In overwhelming accordance, we selected In Sensorium by Tanaïs as the winner of the 2022 Kirkus Nonfiction Prize for its daring, inventiveness, vision, and lyrical eloquence. Using the framework of fragrance and scent, the author's work confronts aspects of our society related to women, gender, and people of color. Seductive, vital, and incomparable, this is a reading experience that endures."
KIRKUS PRIZE NONFICTION JUDGES' STATEMENT
"In Sensorium is a potently beautiful testimonial of feeling, touching, and breathing beyond the boundaries of empire." — Imani Perry, author of South to America
"In Sensorium does to the senses, particularly smell, what Toni Cade Bambara did to sound. I have never come close to experiencing a book that reminds us to accept the calcified histories and fluid futures deeply packed in our senses." —Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy and Long Division
"Lyrical, expansive, aching, and alive." — Jenny Zhang, Author of Sour Heart
BRIGHT LINES, A NOVEL
Named a 2015 finalist for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, The Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize, and the Edmund White Debut Fiction Award.
“The miracles in Bright Lines are the understated moments of family telepathy. . . . An understated queer coming-of-age, a study of how much work it is to be a family, and a snapshot of a disappearing Brooklyn, set against the ghosts of the past, and a search for home.”
—NPR
"Tanaïs’s story is about a modern Bangladeshi American family living in an overstuffed house in Brooklyn in the summer of 2003. They are weird and funny and have revolutionary politics and love so vastly and deeply."
—Jaya Saxena, THE CUT
For any writing or speaking engagements, please contact Tanaïs' agent, PJ Mark:
BOOKS, SELECTED WRITING, INTERVIEWS
COMING IN 2025...!
What does it mean to be diaspora, stripped of the unreasonable project of universality, and instead be intensely committed to decolonization and decentering hegemony, all the while crackling with sensuality and rage?
FROM THE MY LIFE GROWING UP ASIAN IN AMERICA ANTHOLOGY BY MTV BOOKS/ATRIA
Perhaps this is what happens when you don’t bear your own children—motherhood comes for you anyway.
The name I have given myself honors my multiple experiences as a queer, femme, Muslim, Hindu, Bengali, American diasporic being. READ ON THEM.COM
For women who have been in prison, many aspects of self-expression are stripped away from them. As a perfumer, I wondered: What does it mean to be denied something as simple, yet so significant, as one’s perfume in prison?
82 per cent of incarcerated women have faced physical and/or sexual abuse in their lives prior to their time in prison, and many experience violence inside, too. How do we remember the past through painful scent memories, and how might a perfume become an object of healing?