Rajpreet Heir is an Indian from Indiana. She received her B.A. in English Writing from DePauw University and her M.F.A. in Creative Nonfiction from George Mason University, where she taught both literature and composition. Upon graduating in 2016, she moved to New York City and worked first for Getty Images and then TED Conferences. Rajpreet has published nonfiction in both commercial and literary venues including The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The New York Times, Teen Vogue, Brevity, The Normal School, The Harvard Review, and others.

​Her essays often mix the personal with the political and approach difficult topics with humor, as in “Race at the Race: Being Indian-American at the Indianapolis 500” (Lit Hub) or “A Guy on the Subway Told Me I Didn’t Belong in This Country and I Told the Whole World About It” (Cosmopolitan). Rajpreet has also published many movie and book reviews. One review caught the attention of On Being Studios and they featured her on their This Movie Changed Me podcast. Many of these essays are part of a book-in-progress entitled Indian in Indiana.

Degrees

• M.F.A. Creative Nonfiction, George Mason University, 2016
• B.A. English Writing, DePauw University, 2012

Selected Courses

• Personal Essay
• Writing for the Workplace
• Creative Nonfiction

Selected Publications

Media 

• Video selected for The New York Times "What N.Y.C. Sounds Like Every Night at 7" gallery, 2020​
• "Life After the MFA," The Inner Loop Podcast, 2020
• "This Movie Changed Me," On Being Studios, 2018
• "When Your Commute Includes 'You Don't Belong in This Country,'" The New York Times, 2017

Publications

• "Why I won’t comfort my Trump-voting Indian American relatives when I go home for Thanksgiving" The Independent, 2020
• "Sejal Shah's This is One Way to Dance," The Harvard Review, 2020
• "An Indian in Yoga Class: Finding Imbalance," Best of Brevity anthology, 2020
• "How to Compliment a Finance Bro So You Can Secure Half and Leave in Three Years," Points in Case, 2020
• "An Indian in Yoga Class: Finding Imbalance," Brevity, 2019
• "I'm So Jealous You Get To Read 'Anita and Me' by Meera Syal For the First Time," Bustle, 2019
• "Timothy Devevi's Freak Kingdom," The Rupture, 2019
• "Meghan Markle's Trooping the Colour Appearance on the Buckingham Palace Balcony Matters," Teen Vogue, 2018
• "Race at the Race: Being Indian-American at the Indianapolis 500," Lit Hub, 2017
• "A Guy on the Subway Told Me I Didn't Belong in This Country and I Told the Whole World About it," Cosmopolitan, 2017
• "Bend It Like Beckham and the Art of Balancing Cultures," The Atlantic, 2017
• "How Miss Cleo taught me to turn racial stereotypes inside out," The Washington Post, 2016
• "Someday Never Comes," Good Girls Marry Doctors: An Anthology of South Asian American Daughters on Obedience and Rebellion, 2016
• "Frank Vega: It's What's on the Outside That Counts," Your Impossible Voice, 2016

Work Samples

• "The bold and brilliant conference shorts from TEDWomen 2019," TED Blog, 2019
• "Reading list: 23 female TED speakers tell us about the books that shaped them," TED Ideas Blog, 2018
• "10 great films from female directors that you need to stream right now," TED Ideas Blog, 2018

Website

https://www.rajpreetheir.com/