Sanjena Sathian is the author of the critically acclaimed novel GOLD DIGGERS (Penguin Press), which was named a Top 10 Best Book of 2021 by the Washington Post and a Best Book of 2021 by NPR, Electric Literature, and Amazon. It was longlisted for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize and won Georgia’s Townsend Prize for Fiction. She is adapting the novel with Mindy Kaling’s production company, Kaling International, for Amazon Prime Video.

Her short fiction appears or is forthcoming in The Best American Short Stories, The Atlantic, Conjunctions, One Story, Boulevard, The Southern Humanities Review, and more. She’s had nonfiction bylines forThe New York Times, The Drift, The Yale Review, NewYorker.com, and Lithub, among others.

She’s a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and teaches fiction at Emory University.

Her second novel, GODDESS COMPLEX, is forthcoming from Penguin Press in 2025.