Aditi Rao is a writer, teacher, potter, and narrative practitioner.
Aditi is the author of two full length books of poetry, The Fingers Remember (Yoda Press, 2014) and A Kind of Freedom Song (Yoda Press, 2019). Her essays and poems have been published widely, including in Eclectica, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, Four Quarters Magazine, The Feminist Wire, the Indian Quarterly, Qarrtsiluni, The Black Rabbit Review, InfochangeIndia, the Global Partnership for the Prevention of Armed Conflict, the Earth Charter Initiative, The Hindu Business Line, The Ken, and The Morning Context.
Aditi’s work has also received national and international recognition through awards and fellowships, including the Akademie Schloss Solitude Fellowship, the Hedgebrook Residency, the Sangam House International Writers’ Residency, the Srinivas Rayaprol Prize for Poetry, the TFA Creative Writing in English award, the Muse India – Satish Verma Young Writer Award, and others.
Passionate about peace education and working with young people, especially teenagers, Aditi has worked extensively in the youth development and social change sectors, including with Pravah and the Gandhi Fellowship in India, SEDEPAC and UNITONA in Mexico, and The Possibility Project and Student Press Initiative in the USA. In 2014, she founded Tasawwur, a unique arts-for-social-change program that worked with a diverse group of teenagers in New Delhi, for which she received the Change Looms With.in Fellowship 2014 and the World Learning Advancing Leaders Fellowship 2016. She has also been guest faculty at the Conflict Transformation Across Cultures (CONTACT) South-Asia program, run by the School for International Training in Vermont, and the Teacher Research Fellowships offered by the Regional Resource Centre for Elementary Education at Delhi University, along with many other short term teaching and facilitation projects at organisations, think tanks, and universities.
Aditi has a Masters’ of Fine Arts in Writing from Sarah Lawrence College and a Bachelors’ in Liberal Arts from Soka University of America. She also has a certificate in Conflict Transformation and Peacebuilding from the School of International Training, Vermont, and a Diploma in Spanish, Level C1 (Advanced Operational Proficiency) from the Ministry of Education of Spain. In 2023, has also completed the South Asian Diploma in Narrative Practices and Ideas from Narrative Practices India.
Additionally, after over a decade of pursuing pottery as a hobby, Aditi set up her own ceramic studio in 2017, where she makes functional and whimsical pots under the brand “HappyMess Ceramics”. She is also the Creative Director of Camp Nomad, a sustainable camp and retreat space near Shimla
She currently lives in New Delhi and Himachal with her mother, cats, and dog.
