Online Publications:
Modern Loss – When You’re Everyone’s Favorite Grief Doula: “Being the first of my friends to lose a parent, I stand at the ready welcoming others into the club no one wants to join.”
Rice Magazine – Apocalyptic Times: “What I learned in my religious studies courses at Rice helps me understand what the COVID-19 pandemic is revealing about the brokenness in contemporary society.”
The Guardian – ‘Do you sometimes wish you were black?’: how my child and I talk about race: “Beauty standards for women are so unforgiving and baked into our marrow as a society; Shiv’s connection to her body shape and size, her hair and skin tone, are all relationships to which my wife and I pay close attention.”
The Mash-Up Americans – Life, Death, and Parathas: “I realized that my hesitance to learn how to make parathas was directly tied to fear of my mom’s death. Learning to make her signature dish meant acknowledging that someday she, too, will be gone.”
Vogue India – How Nishta J. Mehra navigated the many facets of her identity to finally feel at home within herself: “My life doesn’t look anything like what I would have imagined growing up, or what my parents once imagined for me and yet it is completely reflective of the values they instilled in me and the ethos of the immigrant community in which I was raised.”
Interviews:
Bringing Forth Podcast – Friendship toward difference: “In this episode 2 friends, Nishta Mehra and Courtney Humphreys, share how the differences of race, religion and sexuality in their friendship have been sources of depth and intimacy.”
Electric Lit – “‘Brown White Black’ Is A Love Story About Family and Identity [interview]: “Through frank, clear prose Mehra explores what it means to be a part of a family that the world does not often recognize. Her book is a meditation on lived experience and how one comes to be, but it’s also a love story one that emphasizes the intersecting identities of Mehra, her wife, and her daughter.”
Houston Chronicle – Writer Nishta Mehra describes her ‘family that checks all the boxes’ [interview]: “Making more room for people who fall into a certain category is beneficial to everybody: It makes more room for everybody. We all benefit.”
Outspoken Voices – Intersecting Identities [podcast]: “Two LGBTQ+ parents of color, from the south, in multiracial families share their experiences, funny stories, and hope for the future.”
The Gaysian Podcast – Creating Asian American Culture: “We get into so many things including, the role Hinduism has played in her connection to identity, struggling with both assimilating and standing out, and how she and her family are truly creating these beautiful images of Asian American culture.”
The Longest Shortest Time [podcast]: “Nishta Mehra and her wife Jill Carroll like to joke that they’re a family that “checks all the boxes. When Jill and Nishta started down the path to adopting a child there were suddenly even more checkboxes to consider. Their approach to family is the subject of Nishta’s book.”
The Matriarchitects [podcast]: “Nishta…discussed the need for other communities of color to work against anti-blackness and both the frustration and the freedom of making it up as you go along when navigating intersecting identities.”
This Movie Changed Me [podcast]: “In tracing the lives of two generations of a family, the movie [The Namesake] examines not just the opportunity and promise gained from immigrating to a new country, but also all that is lost from one generation to the next. The wholeness of this depiction offered solace to writer Nishta Mehra after her father’s death. For her, the movie mirrored back the parts of her parents’ lives she did not understand as a young person.”
The Nasiona [podcast]: “Most TV and movies portray adoption as a white parent adopting a child. This is true in such mainstream shows as Friends, Glee, 90210, Modern Family, Sex and The City, Grey’s Anatomy, and Parenthood. This representation is often how people think of adoption, something that can get frustrating for Nishta J. Mehra, an Indian woman with a white wife and black adopted child.”
Vogue India – How Nishta J. Mehra navigated the many facets of her identity to finally feel at home within herself: “My life doesn’t look anything like what I would have imagined growing up, or what my parents once imagined for me and yet it is completely reflective of the values they instilled in me and the ethos of the immigrant community in which I was raised.”
WNYC’s The Takeaway – On the Power of Love to Bridge Divides [radio interview]: “It’s said often these days that we live in deeply divided times, love seems to be one force that helps bridge those divides — at least it has been for Nishta J. Mehra.”
Zora – The Complexities of Writing About Race & Identity [in conversation with T Kira Madden and Sarah Valentine]: “In this intimate Q&A, three authors discuss how they’re changing the narratives about people of color.”