Author Interview: Sunu P. Chandy

Aug 20, 2025 | Events, News

In anticipation of the upcoming Social Justice Poetry Reading and Discussion on August 22 Booksweet bookseller Bella chatted with author Sunu P. Chandy about her book My Dear Comrades, her online writing support community, and the inspiration for her writing. Sunu will be joined by fellow authors and activists Minal Hajratwala, Dr. LeConté Dill, & Isabella Morena to celebrate Sunu P. Chandy’s My Dear Comrades!

Your RSVP to our event through Eventbrite is helpful for our planning.

 

Can you give us an introduction and a bit of your background?

Hello, this is Sunu P. Chandy, and I’m really excited to be taking part in an event with Booksweet this Friday. I am a poet and a civil rights lawyer, and I’ve been writing poems for many years. In 2013, I completed my MFA, and I had been working on a poetry manuscript during those years. I picked it up again during the pandemic because I had a supportive online virtual community. Actually one of the co-presenters on Friday is the one who started that group. Minal Hajratwala started Unicorn Authors Club, which is a group of writers who learn together and support each other and hold each other accountable. The group includes poets, novelists, essayists, etc. It’s a way to have a community as you improve your craft, but the group also helps address some of the fears and barriers. This group helped me with the nitty gritty of how you go from an idea and a spark to making sure that I maintained that discipline and accountability to write, edit, and go through all the necessary and tedious steps. And then of course there’s finding a publisher, and the publishing process and then the publicity process. Each of these areas are ones that, unless you’ve gone through them, you likely won’t know anything about how they work. So this community encourages people to have the courage to take those steps one by one. Because of the support of that virtual community, I sent out my poetry manuscript and it was picked up through a poetry book contest with Regal House. Now that My Dear Comrades is out in the world it’s really exciting to have a more tangible way to share poems and to build community with more people. And these relationships we started there have continued. I’m really excited to celebrate one of my fellow Unicorn authors, Sangamithra Iyer, and be in conversation with her for her book event for “Governing Bodies” on November 18th in DC at Lost City Books. 

I also want to share that I’m a senior advisor with Democracy Forward and we’re a nonprofit litigation group led by Skye Perryman that helps to fight many of the harmful policies brought by the Trump administration in court. My colleagues have brought many of the lawsuits currently going on against the Trump administration and we have had many successes in court to stop and slow down these harms alongside partner organizations. In my role I am also grateful to connect with many leaders in the work for LGBTQIA+ equality and as part of that coalition I am grateful to know people like Naomi Goldberg who leads up the Movement Advance Project (MAP), and she is based here in Ann Arbor. MAP provides rigorous research, insight and communications that help speed equality and opportunity for all. I encourage folks to follow both MAP and Democracy Forward on social media. Please also sign up for Democracy Forward’s weekly email newsletter on our website to learn about our cases and other work, and be part of this necessary movement. 

 

How long have you been writing poetry? What got you started in writing poetry and how has your writing evolved?

I started writing poems when I went through experiences that were confusing or difficult or that I had a range of emotions about. I think my poems still to this day often have that sort of complexity and nuance that may not be expected. That’s what people tell me they appreciate about many of my poems. I give voice to those pieces within us. These may include areas or emotions that you shouldn’t talk about or ones where you implicate yourself as the speaker in the poem. I think that people can find themselves in the work when those sorts of complexities are voiced through poems. I think the way that my poetry has evolved includes some of the subject matter. The title poem, “Comrades,” and a handful of other poems are about the journey to becoming a parent, and the book also includes poems about parenting a toddler. Now the child is 15, and so there’s poetry about parenting a tween and a teen. As our daughter has grown, I think that the storytelling has evolved. 

I also have poems that include stories from my legal career. I used to be a civil rights lawyer in the federal government for many years. More recently, I have been at nonprofits and am now at one that is suing the federal government given the kind of harms we’re seeing. My legal career provides plenty of fodder, and some of the poems directly address the cases as well. With the legal work, you’re trying to convince judges, but we are always highlighting the stories of the lived people who are being harmed in the case. The storytelling is crucial to bringing along the public and the court about what’s at stake. So there are definitely parallels there. I do have a few poems in the book, My Dear Comrades, that are specifically about affirmative action and how that relates to diversity and equity and the ongoing attacks in that space. One such poem is about my admission to law school, and another more recent one is about listening to the affirmative action court case virtually during the pandemic while my daughter took a grade school standardized test virtually at home. I also must emphasize in this moment that there are many ways that folks can continue to decrease barriers and increase equity in the workplace and beyond. At Democracy Forward, we just issued a report highlighting the fact that civil rights laws endure despite the reality of the attacks on DEI by this administration. That report is linked here. All that to say, there are many direct and indirect connections between my poetry and legal work, and both center on social justice. 

 

Was there a poet who inspired you when you were younger? And do you have any poets who inspire you now?

Yes. I’d love to mention Gwendolyn Brooks. I went to junior high and high school in Chicago and she spoke at one of my friend’s graduations. I have a personalized autograph from Gwendolyn Brooks on my friend’s graduation program. I was so excited to find that again in our files. I also used her words as an epigraph at the beginning of my book. So people can look for that quote when they open up the book. One of my other favorite poets is Naomi Shihab Nye, and “Gate A-4” will always be a favorite poem. I also appreciate Ada Limón, who’s our current poet laureate. I was going back and reading some of her poetry books for The Sealey Challenge where you read a book of poetry every day in August. I have been using the Sealey Challenge for inspiration and I also am going to pull out this book that I just read last week called GHOST :: SEEDS by Sebastian Merrill. This is an incredible book, both about trans identity, and the poet also includes all of this imagery from the coast of Maine, a place I just recently visited in May. It was so powerful to combine the visual elements of this rocky coast, and these pieces of identity. Putting this in my words, the poems explore what happens to the person you were before when you change or when you transition. And that can be most directly about trans identity, but as Kimiko Hahn who selected this book for publication, noted, others may have our own versions of that too. When I read this book last week, I considered the versions of my life that I didn’t live. Like what if I had taken this turn or went in that direction, who would I be right now? And I think that’s what poetry can do so beautifully, is create those moments of connection with the speaker. As a board member for the Transgender Law Center, I also want to ask us all to show up for the trans community right now. As allies, it’s so important for all of us to lift up trans folks including trans joy too even as folks’ rights are being increasingly challenged. 

 

What inspires you in your poetry?

I’m just coming back from a Buddhist family retreat, and so I’m thinking a lot about mindfulness. I know how progressive religious communities can be forces for good, and I do have a couple of poems that are specifically about these areas too. There’s one called: “Practice raking leaves or sweeping to remind oneself of the feeling of engaging in work that knows no end.” This poem reminds me of my professor from Earlham College, Barb Caruso, who gave a wonderful speech about her parents teaching her about the need to keep shoveling the snow. As a child she would ask, why do we have to keep doing this? In her talk “On Being Redundant: Freedom is not Once” she explains this whole metaphor for activism. We’re sort of all waiting for everything to be done, but the work continues and it must, and we must do our part just as those before us fought so hard for what we have now. What also inspires me is knowing other artists/ activists who find joy in the work. Recently, I’ve been using the late incredible poet, Andrea Gibson’s poem, “Things That Don’t Suck” as my icebreaker when I go to meetings. As they modeled, we must name three things that don’t suck before we start working on our projects. As we continue to work, we have to lift up what’s good in our lives, what we are fighting for, and share that as well as all the harms. I actually have a new poem that’s not in this book, about this challenge of naming “one good thing” that maybe I’ll share at the reading on Friday.

I also find refuge from being part of the Unitarian religious community here in DC. At our church, I recently completed the “Our Whole Lives,” a training to be a youth facilitator for sexuality education in our Unitarian community. I hear that Ann Arbor has a terrific Unitarian church led by senior minister, Reverend Manish Mishra-Marzetti as well. I’m hoping to meet some of the folks from this social justice community on Friday evening. 

 

Do you have any advice for aspiring poets?

Many of my poems began in writing workshops. During the pandemic, I took part in many virtual workshops. One of the poets who is going to be there Friday, Isabella Morena, has also been leading terrific virtual workshops too. I actually met Isabella in Women of Color workshops in Brooklyn led by Sister Bisi Ideraabdullah. Similarly, I met Dr. Leconté Dill, through a writing community in Brooklyn led by JP Howard, called Women Writers in Bloom. These spaces are so important to build community as writers and also to help us push towards our dreams for ourselves. Another such workshop was “Praise in Hard Times” that I took virtually from the Provincetown, Massachusetts Fine Arts Work Center. Leila Chatti was the teacher and we had wonderful prompts during the pandemic. I think six poems in my book are from Leila’s prompts. And, this week, I just saw that Maggie Smith included a poem by Leila in the Slowdown. 

Many poems are percolating inside me on any given day, but unless I make the actual time, structure and space, they’ll never be written. They’ll just come and go, they float in and out. And so, I think my advice for aspiring writers would be to find writing communities. Take space for yourself to get those poems out because I will tell you the same thing other people told me, the world needs you and your poetry. 

 

Do you have any significant memory about or related to an independent bookstore?

I do have one poem that is set in an independent bookstore in the Lower East Side of Manhattan called Bluestockings. It was really amazing to have a book event in NYC and share that poem in that space. In DC, I had my original book launch at Politics and Prose Bookstore, and I have loved learning about more independent bookstores through my events. There are also many other wonderful bookstores in DC, including Busboys and Poets, Lost City Books, Kramers, and Loyalty. I have a poetry feature event scheduled in Austin this November at a feminist queer bookstore, BookWoman. I was so happy to see this place like this, and was so glad to buy books there when I visited last year. I always encourage folks to pick up books from independent bookstores and I see these as also places for activism and community building. I loved seeing that mission mirrored when I read about the values of Booksweet.

 

Thank you so much to Sunu P. Chandy for chatting with us. To learn more about her, her work, and her upcoming events please visit her website, sunuchandy.net. Join us at Booksweet on Friday September 22 at 6pm EDT for a Social Justice Poetry Reading and Discussion. Your RSVP to our event through Eventbrite is helpful for our planning.

 

About the event

Booksweet is thrilled to welcome authors Sunu P. Chandy, Minal Hajratwala, Dr. LeConté Dill, & Isabella Morena to read from their works and discuss their writing in celebration of the launch of Sunu P. Chandy’s My Dear Comrades. We will also have audience Q&A, book signings, and light refreshments!

About the Book

In this poetry collection, Sunu P. Chandy includes stories about her experiences as a woman, civil rights attorney, parent, partner, daughter of South Asian immigrants, and member of the LGBTQ community. These poems cover themes ranging from immigration, social justice activism, friendship loss, fertility challenges, adoption, caregiving, and life during a pandemic. Sunu’s poems provide some resolve, some peace, some community, amidst the competing notions of how we are expected to be in the world, especially when facing a range of barriers. Sunu’s poems provide company for many who may be experiencing isolation through any one of these experiences and remind us that we are not, in fact, going it alone. Whether the experience is being disregarded as a woman of color attorney, being rejected for being queer, losing a most treasured friendship, doubting one’s romantic partner or any other form of heartbreak, Sunu’s poems highlight the human requirement of continually starting anew. These poems remind us that we can, and we will, rebuild.

About the Authors

Sunu P. Chandy (she/her) is a social justice activist including through her work as a poet and a civil rights attorney. She’s the daughter of immigrants from Kerala, India, a queer woman of color, and lives in Washington, D.C. with her family. Her award-winning collection of poems, My Dear Comrades, was published by Regal House. Sunu’s creative work can also be found in Asian American Literary Review, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Poets on Adoption, Split this Rock’s online social justice database, The Quarry, and in anthologies including The Penguin Book of Indian Poets, The Long Devotion: Poets Writing Motherhood and This Bridge We Call Home: Radical Visions for Transformation. Sunu is currently a Senior Advisor with Democracy Forward. Sunu has worked for many years as a civil rights attorney, including as a litigator with EEOC for 15 years. Sunu was also the Legal Director of the National Women’s Law Center for six years until August 2023. Sunu earned her B.A. in Peace and Global Studies/Women’s Studies from Earlham College, her law degree from Northeastern University School of Law and her MFA in Creative Writing (Poetry) from Queens College/The City University of New York in 2013. Sunu is on the board of the Transgender Law Center, and was included as one the Washington Blade’s Queer Women of Washington and one of Go Magazine’s 100 Women We Love. Sunu is delighted to celebrate her collection of poetry, My Dear Comrades, alongside the book’s fabulous cover artist, Ragni Agarwal.

Minal Hajratwala (they/she) founded the Unicorn Authors Club to guide authors of color (and allies who really mean it!) to finish books. She is currently at work on a book about creative practice, The Chakra Playbook: For Artists, Creatives, and People with Spines, under contract with Hachette (Spring 2026). Her first book, Leaving India: My Family’s Journey From Five Villages to Five Continents, was called “incomparable” by Alice Walker and “searingly honest” by the Washington Post. It won a Pen USA Award, an Asian American Writers Workshop Award, a Lambda Literary Award, and a California Book Award. Minal is the author of poetry collection, Bountiful Instructions for Enlightenment, and a travel guidebook, Moon Fiji. As a journalist, they were an editor-at-large at Zócalo Public Square, ran the Sunday Perspective section of the San Jose Mercury News, and was a National Arts Journalism Program fellow at Columbia University. In 2010-11 she was a Fulbright senior fellow in Mumbai, where she edited a groundbreaking anthology, Out! Stories from the New Queer India. She is board vice chair of the Hedgebrook residency for women+ writers. www.unicornauthors.club

Dr. LeConté Dill was born and raised in South Central Los Angeles, California. She is a poet, playwright, educator, and scholar in and out of classroom and community spaces. She holds degrees from Spelman College, UCLA, and UC Berkeley, was a Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop Fellow and a Hurston/Wright Writers Workshop Fellow and has participated in VONA Voices and Cave Canem writing workshops. Currently, she is the Director of Graduate Studies and an Associate Professor in the Department of African American and African Studies at Michigan State University. She is also a Certified Mindfulness Instructor. In Dr. Dill’s art, research, and activism, she listens to and shows up for urban Black girls, in particular, and works to rigorously document their experiences and strategies of safety, resilience, resistance, and wellness. Her work is critically informed by years of working in partnership with youth and community organizers, policy advocates, and health educators at community-based organizations and public health departments across the U.S. and South Africa. Her work has been published in a diverse array of spaces, such as Poetry Magazine, Mom Egg Review, Journal of Poetry Therapy, the Du Bois Review, and The Feminist Wire.

Isabella Moreno (Nonfiction) is a Nuyorican proudly hailing from the Bronx; writing, gardening and blossoming in Cleveland, Ohio. Her personal writing explores, and gives testament to, memories, recollections and anecdotes influenced by her multi-generational (multi-hyphenated) familial experiences with an ever-changing historical background. She has 30 years of experience in education from K-12 classrooms to non-profit and college administration. For 15+ years she has created workshops for creatives of color. She is the founder of Illuminating Our Voices. She believes joy can always be found in collective spaces of shared creation. Her two adult children add the magical rhythm to her heart.