Kiran Kaur Saini is a Pushcart Prize-nominated writer of literary and speculative fiction. She has been awarded the Henfield Prize for Fiction and has had work nominated for the Premios Ignotus in Spain. Her stories appear regularly in both literary and speculative journals, including Gulf Coast, Shenandoah, Pleiades, Strange Horizons, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and Glimmer Train, and have been selected for inclusion in Best Small Fictions and other anthologies. Her work has been translated into Spanish and Portuguese and has been published in Canada, Australia, India, and Brazil. For her author website, visit Kiran Kaur Saini.

After completing her study of Music Composition and Russian Language and Literature at Smith College, Kiran earned her MFA in fiction writing from Sarah Lawrence College, and her PhD in English Literature from University of Louisiana at Lafayette, where she also taught creative writing to undergraduates. In addition to the fiction writing courses she teaches under the Beyond the Writing Workshop umbrella and at other institutions, she has also taught, over the years, The Art of Critique,  Script Supervising for film, TV, and commercials (IMDB,) and Database Design with Filemaker Pro. In her former professional capacity in IT and instructional design, she has written software application documentation and trained end users on database administration and online membership and payment solutions.

During her transition from corporate to creative life, Kiran owned and operated the yoga studio, Ashtanga Yoga New Orleans, where she taught Mysore-style Ashtanga yoga six days a week for five years, as she learned it from Nancy Gilgoff and Sri Pattabhi K. Jois.

Following decades of various teaching endeavors, Beyond the Writing Workshop is Kiran’s passion teaching project, gradually compiling a lifetime of observations about writing craft and life.