On March 28, from 6:30 - 8:00 p.m., Columbia Fiction Foundry hosted an evening with author Parul Kapur '89 SOA, to celebrate her critically acclaimed debut novel, INSIDE THE MIRROR. The event took place at the Columbia Alumni Center, 622 W 113th Street, New York, NY, and via Zoom.

INSIDE THE MIRROR, about twin sister artists coming of age in mid-century India, won the AWP Prize for the Novel and was published by the University of Nebraska Press, receiving a starred review from Publisher's Weekly, which called it a "stunning debut novel".

Tania Moore, President of CFF, sat down with Parul to discuss her thirty-year journey to publication as well as journalistic strategies that informed her creative process. An arts journalist and critic, she shared how her love of visual art and dance combined with history in writing a story of two young women struggling to forge their identities as a nation remakes its own identity in the devastating aftermath of colonial rule.

Parul was born in Assam, India and raised in Connecticut. Her fiction appears in Ploughshares, Pleiades, Prime Number and elsewhere. She has contributed articles and reviews to The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal Europe, Esquire, Slate, Guernica and The Paris Review, among others. She was a press officer at the United Nations in New York, and worked as a reporter at the city magazine Bombay in India. She holds an MFA from Columbia University and lives in Atlanta with her family. 

A book signing and reception followed the talk, which was free and open to all alumni.