She graduated from University of Alberta, and received an MA from the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University in 2004 and an MFA from the University of Arizona in 2006.
Her short stories have appeared in Subtropics, New Letters, PRISM international, Boston Review, and Malahat Review.
She lives in Fayetteville, Arkansas, with her husband, the poet/translator Geoffrey Brock, and their two children.
, takes place in South India in the first half of the twentieth century.
Plays
"House of Sacred Cows," originally produced by Northern Light Theatre in Edmonton and later published in the volume Ethnicities: Plays from the New West (1999)
"By Air, By Water, By Wood", Frog and Nightgown Productions 2000, published South Asian Review, 2008
In the introduction to her stunning first novel, Padma Viswanathan describes her grandmother’s faltering attempts to recount their family history. “This time, she started farther back,” she writes of one occasion, “with a story I’d never heard: of her own grandmother, married as a child and widowed before she was out of her teens; of that grandmother’s son, childless and embittered; and her daughter, my grandmother’s mother, victimized by her marriage.” After trips to India, enormous amounts of research, and not a little invention, the result is The Toss of a Lemon.