Kanika Agrawal is an Indian citizen and hybrid specimen developed across six countries on four continents. She studied biology at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she came to love restriction enzymes and fluorescent labeling. She earned a M.F.A. degree in writing from Columbia University and a Ph.D. in English/creative writing from the University of Denver. She also taught academic and creative writing at both institutions.
Her work appears or is forthcoming in Best American Experimental Writing 2020, Black Warrior Review, Foglifter, Notre Dame Review, SAND, and various Fantasty and Science Fiction (SF&F) publications. Her first chapbook will be published by Oversound in early 2020. Her primary work-in-progress, Okazaki Fragments, adapts language and images from a series of scientific papers on discontinuous strand synthesis during DNA replication. This research was led by the Japanese molecular biologists Okazaki and Okazaki. The chapbook (re)constructs Okazaki and Okazaki’s experiences by reading their lives into (or out of) their scientific papers.
