If I were a country/and you my journalist/I would have shot you/down a street/and left you to bleed. Fierce and unflinching, Rochelle Potkar's poetry springs from the deeply personal and ripples out to the world, capturing lover's whispers and reverberations of explosions with equal ease. Vividly depicting love, grief, anger, defiance, these poems glimmer like coins beneath the water surface, tethered with the weight of wishes clinging to them. As sensuous as it is articulate, Coins in Rivers is a deep meditation on womanhood, motherhood, and citizenship. The legendary poet Jayanta Mahapatra said of it, "Exceptional work, this. A haunting inventiveness runs through these poems. Rochelle Potkar's imagination is rich and carefully employed to her poetic purposes, sensitively met with through her concrete imagery and cosmopolitan vocabulary.

Rochelle Potkar is a prize-winning poet, author, and screenwriter based in Mumbai. She will be in conversation with Bangalore-based poet Poornima Laxmeshwar. Come join us as we discuss poetry, womanhood, citizenry, and our place in the world.

Poornima Laxmeshwar resides in Bangalore, India. Her books of poetry include ‘Anything but Poetry’ (Writers Workshop), ‘Thirteen’ - a chapbook, (Yavanika Press) and 'Strings Attached', (Red River). She is currently working on fiction and an upcoming prose poetry collection.

Widely anthologized, Rochelle Potkar is a prize-winning poet, author, and screenwriter based in Mumbai. She is the author of Four Degrees of Separation (poetry), Paper Asylum (haibun) - shortlisted for the Rabindranath Tagore Literary Prize 2020, and Bombay Hangovers (short fiction). An alumna of Iowa’s International Writing Program (2015) and a Charles Wallace Writer’s fellow, University. of Stirling (2017), her poetry film Skirt featured on Shonda Rhimes' Shondaland. As a creative-writing mentor, she has conducted poetry workshops at the Himalayan Writing Retreat and Iowa’s International Writing Summer Programs. Her prize-winning manuscript of poetry ‘Coins in Rivers' released in April 2024 by Hachette India. Her play 'Catharsis/Drama Queens' will be staged in Tamil at Prakriti's Foundation's Short+Sweet South India Theatre Festival this September.