RAO

Reema Rao is a fiction writer from Chicago, currently at work on a short story collection and a novel.

Her writing explores shades of shame and is interested in challenging the legacy of the “good Indian woman.” She asks: what have we collectively deemed shameful? And then, what is lost and gained in abandoning it for one’s own desire? While eclectic in narratives of girlhood, womanhood, motherhood, wifehood, and simply selfhood, her work is thematically united by characters confronting their hushed or hidden impulses.

Reema’s stories have been published in Witness, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Los Angeles Review, and elsewhere, and have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, named finalist for Best of the Net, and longlisted for the Wigleaf Top 50 Very Short Fictions. She is a 2026 Periplus Fellowship Finalist and a 2024-2025 Blue Stoop x Jennifer Weiner Fellow. She has received support from the Illinois Arts Council, Storyknife Writers Retreat, Tin House, the Kenyon Review, American Short Fiction, and more.

She is a wife, mama, and pup-parent.