Echo in Four Beats

Combining elements, rhythms, and personas from American jazz, blues, and ragtime, poet Rita Banerjee presents a modern-day spin on the love story of Echo and Narcissus in her debut full-length poetry collection, Echo in Four Beats. But in this story, told in four parts, Echo is more than just a fragment, she is a Sapphic voice that speaks, foretells, forestalls, and repeats. Echo in Four Beats was a finalist for the Red Hen Press Benjamin Saltman Award, the Three Mile Harbor Book Prize, the Aquarius Press/Willow Books Literature Award.

Rita Banerjee is the editor of CREDO: An Anthology of Manifestos and Sourcebook for Creative Writing (C&R Press, May 2018) and the author of the poetry collection Echo in Four Beats (Finishing Line Press, March 2018), which was a finalist for the Red Hen Press Benjamin Saltman Award, Three Mile Harbor Poetry Prize, and Aquarius Press / Willow Books Literature Award, the novella "A Night with Kali" in Approaching Footsteps (Spider Road Press, 2016), and the poetry chapbook Cracklers at Night (Finishing Line Press, 2010). She earned her doctorate in Comparative Literature from Harvard and her M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Washington, and her work appears in the Academy of American Poets, Poets & Writers, Nat. Brut., The Rumpus, The Scofield, Hyphen Magazine, Electric Literature, Painted Bride Quarterly, VIDA: Women in Literary Arts, Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. She is the Executive Creative Director of the Cambridge Writers' Workshop and an Associate Scholar of Comparative Literature at Harvard University, and teaches on modernism, art-house film, and South Asian literary theory at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in Germany. She is the judge for the 2017 Minerva Rising "Dare to Speak" Poetry Chapbook Contest, and she is currently working on a novel about a Tamil-Jewish American family in crisis during a post-authoritarian regime, a book on South Asian literary modernisms, a documentary film about race and intimacy in the United States and in France, and a collection of essays on race, sex, politics, and everything cool.