Coming out as Dalit: Book Talk with Author Yashica Dutt

Join us for a book talk about Coming Out as Dalit with award-winning author, Yashica Dutt on Monday, February 12, 2024 at 5:00 PM. 

Yashica Dutt, the award-winning author of Coming Out as Dalit, is an internationally acclaimed journalist and one of the world’s leading feminist voices on caste. Dutt is a notable caste expert recognized for highlighting Dalit rights globally and her voice has been instrumental in understanding the realities of caste within the increasingly prominent Indian diaspora. Dutt's work has been published in the New York Times, Foreign Policy and The Atlantic, and she has been featured on the BBC, The Guardian and PBS Newshour. Her writing has been part of Pen America’s India at 75 anthology that featured prominent Indian writers looking back on India’s history in its 75th year of independence, and a collection titled Our Freedoms: Essays and Stories from India’s Best Writers. Coming Out as Dalit, which was published in the South Asian subcontinent in 2019, quickly became a best-seller and is currently part of the curriculum in over 50 colleges and universities worldwide, including Harvard University, UC Berkeley, and UC Davis. Coming Out as Dalit is among the first books written by a Dalit author in English to win the prestigious Indian Arts and Letters Award for young writers in 2020. 

Dutt was involved in the passing of the historic anti-caste bill in the city of Seattle and her writing has been instrumental in shaping the text of the first-in-nation law. The highly anticipated, revised, and updated version of Coming Out as Dalit will be published by Beacon Press in February 2024, and has been called as “an elucidating history of Dalit discrimination and activism” by Kirkus Review. This new edition focuses on the ongoing struggle for caste rights in the US, and helps unpack its crucial and urgent history, especially in the light of the recent, historic veto of California's caste discrimination bill. Dutt is currently working on her second book on caste in the United States, also commissioned by Beacon Press. She graduated from Columbia Journalism School and lives in Brooklyn. 

This event is sponsored by the Center for South Asia at Stanford University.