Pushcart-prize winning poet, author, editor, translator, and professor, Ravi Shankar, PhD is the author and editor of over 18 books and chapbooks of poetry, including Bhutan: Dispatch from the Land of the Thunder Dragon (Fortunate Traveler, 2025); Tallying the Hemispheres: New and Selected Essays (Nirala Books, 2023); Memoir Magazine and Connecticut Book Award finalist Correctional (University of Wisconsin Press, 2022); Many Uses of Mint: New and Selected Poems: 1998-2018 (Recent Works Press, 2018); W.W. Norton & Co.'s Language for a New Century called a "beautiful achievement for world literature" by Nobel Prize winner Nadine Gordimer; the Muse India Award winning translations of 8th century Tamil poet/saint Autobiography of a Goddess (Zubaan/University of Chicago Press, 2017); the National Poetry Review Prize winning Deepening Groove; the Carolina Wren judges award winning What Else Could it Be; and the finalist for the Connecticut Book Awards Instrumentality, poems from which have appeared around the world.

Shankar received his PhD as an International Research Fellow from the University of Sydney, his MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia University, and his BA with highest distinction from the University of Virginia. Translated into over 12 languages and recipient of a Glenna Luschei Award from Prairie Schooner as well as winner of the Gulf Coast Poetry Prize, Shankar has taught at such institutions as Columbia University, Fairfield University, the City University of Hong Kong, and the University of Sydney. He has held fellowships from the Corporation of Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, the Jentel Foundation, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, the Blue Mountain Center, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Vashon Island, among many others.

Recipient of numerous grants and awards, including multiple Excellence-in-Teaching Awards, his students have gone on to publish dozens of books of their own. Granted fellowships by the New York State Council on the Arts, the Connecticut Center for the Book, NYFA (New York Foundation for the Arts), and the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts, Shankar has been featured in The New York Times, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Paris Review and on radio and TV including BBC, NPR, and the PBS NewsHour. He has collaborated with the late American artist Sol LeWitt, Mel Chin, and writers Eileen Myles, Jim Daniels, Camille Dungy, among others.

His essays and reviews have appeared in such places as The Georgia Review, The Hartford Courant, AWP Writers Chronicle, and for the Poetry Society of America. He has been featured at the Poetry Foundation, the Academy of American Poets, and Poetry International. He founded one of the world’s oldest electronic journals of the arts, Drunken Boat, winner of a South by Southwest Web Award.

He currently teaches creative writing at Tufts University and helps direct immersive international writing retreats for the New York Writers Workshop. In addition to performances and lectures, he is available for individual consultancy, workshops, editing, and mentoring services around the world.