Vidyan Ravinthiran was born in Leeds, England, to Sri Lankan Tamils. He now teaches at Harvard University. He writes both poetry and literary criticism.

How often are we rendered strange and unmappable to ourselves by the very cultures that seek to classify and contain us? And yet, as Vidyan Ravinthiran writes, "how hard it seems, for many of us, to even begin to escape the face in the mirror!" With fearless honesty and a stunning lyric imagination, Asian/Other disrupts the silence and dispels the darkness into which so much vital testimony has been huddled. This is a bold, borderless, breathtaking memoir about race, language, inheritance, and love's many forms and outposts.

Vidyan Ravinthiran was born in Leeds, England, to Sri Lankan Tamils. He now teaches at Harvard University. He writes both poetry and literary criticism.

How often are we rendered strange and unmappable to ourselves by the very cultures that seek to classify and contain us? And yet, as Vidyan Ravinthiran writes, "how hard it seems, for many of us, to even begin to escape the face in the mirror!" With fearless honesty and a stunning lyric imagination, Asian/Other disrupts the silence and dispels the darkness into which so much vital testimony has been huddled. This is a bold, borderless, breathtaking memoir about race, language, inheritance, and love's many forms and outposts.

Vidyan Ravinthiran was born in Leeds, England, to Sri Lankan Tamils. He now teaches at Harvard University. He writes both poetry and literary criticism.

How often are we rendered strange and unmappable to ourselves by the very cultures that seek to classify and contain us? And yet, as Vidyan Ravinthiran writes, "how hard it seems, for many of us, to even begin to escape the face in the mirror!" With fearless honesty and a stunning lyric imagination, Asian/Other disrupts the silence and dispels the darkness into which so much vital testimony has been huddled. This is a bold, borderless, breathtaking memoir about race, language, inheritance, and love's many forms and outposts.