Sejal Shah is the author of the debut short story collection How to Make Your Mother Cry and the award-winning debut essay collection, This Is One Way to Dance, an NPR Best Book of 2020. Her work has appeared in Brevity, Conjunctions, the Guardian, the Kenyon Review, and Literary Hub, among others. In 2021, she was named an influential AAPI Leader by Good Morning America and ABC News.

In response to the theme this year–A/I: Artistic Intelligence and Artificial Intelligence–Shah writes, "I try to pretend AI is not there, but I can't. When someone plagiarizes, you can point it out. With AI, it's theft without being able to point out how exactly it's being done and how it will be used. Many writers' works (including one of my books) are being used against copyright to train AI, which is a theft of intellectual property."

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