About Me
My name is Neeraj Senthil-Kumar, and I’m a writer based in New York City. I was born in Bangalore, India to Tamil parents and grew up in Kuwait. I came to the United States when I was 18 years old.
I currently work as an engineer to support myself financially. I have a bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (2022) and a master’s degree in Computer Science, with a specialization in Data Science, from the University of Rochester (2024).
Presently, my creative work currently primarily consists of: an experimental literary fiction novel (whose first chapter can be found in the Black Warrior Review), a children’s book on spirituality, and my one-off poems, which I plan to one day collate into themed collections.
My Two-Sentence Submission Bio
Neeraj Senthil-Kumar is an Indian-born, Kuwaiti-raised electrical engineer and data scientist. He currently lives in Brooklyn, NY with his three houseplants.
Works I Am Currently Seeking Representation from Literary Agents For
America Is The World (Experimental Fiction)
Alternating passages in America Is The World is written in an experimental verse form that acts as a hyper-literal translation from Tamil to English, wrapping English’s vocabulary Tamil’s syntax and morphology. Examples and explanations of this, done with Tamil and other languages including Biblical Hebrew and Dialectical as well as Classical Arabic, can be found on my Substack and in my short form video content on Tiktok and Instagram.
Another way to view this approach is that it is an attempt to create a literary pidgin language between Tamil and English, a language that reinterprets English through Tamil’s grammar. People are often chided or mocked when speaking a foreign language incorrectly, for example when they, out of habit, impose the rules of their native language onto a learned language. Following this, yet another way of viewing this form of verse is that it is an attempt to see the beauty in those kinds of grammatical mistakes, by seeing their potential if taken all the way to form its own language, one with its own forms and rules.
The first chapter of the manuscript has already been published in the historic Black Warrior Review’s Summer 2026 Edition. Below is how Chinaecherem Obor, editor of the Black Warrior Review, explained the form:
“In Neeraj Senthil-Kumar’s experimental forms piece, “My Life, My Whole Life,” the very elements that make up the nucleus of meaning-making in the colonial language of English—morphology and syntax—are reinvented and subjected to the morphological and syntactic rules of Tamil.”
I would only disagree in the assertion that English is a colonial language: since it is my language, and since I am not a colonizer.
Below is a synopsis of the novel’s plot
America Is The World tells the story of Narasimha, a young man as he first comes of age in rural Tamil Nadu. There, his frustrations grow with the prejudices and suffocating social norms, particularly around love and relationships, of his homeland. There he dreams idly of one day living in America, a land he has only seen on television and in movies, a land he dreams is free of prejudice and hatred—a land where he believes love blooms free.
When his life in Tamil Nadu begins to fall apart, he accepts a coyote smuggler’s offer to bring him to the United States, where he is promised work as a meat packer. He accepts the offer, but he soon discovers that his new home is far from what he imagined. Made to work 12-hour shifts for months on end with only a few hours of sleep each night, the physical toll as well as the emotional disassociation required to slaughter animals on an industrial scale soon begin to pull apart his consciousness, as he begins to self-medicate with hard drugs.
Through his journey, he comes to find the beauty and the horror in the American dream. Although it tells a painful story of immigration and disillusion, the work never lets go hidden its love for this land and its people.
The novel is far from auto-biographical, but it mirrors my own story with America. I have come to love America more than most Americans can understand, as someone who’s had to fight for every squared inch of his place within it.
City of Dreams (Working Title)
City of Dreams is my working title for the collection of poems that I have so far been self-publishing on my Substack. I intend for the collection, told in vignettes, to be a a celebration of this tender, proud city we get to call home, as well as testament to my experience living within it through this moment in history.
Recurring themes in these poems (since they are recurring themes in my life) are: love, human unity, and New York City. You can find the poems here.
