"This Is One Way to Dance" by Sejal Shah

2001 resident and writer Sejal Shah has donated her (signed!) debut essay collection, This Is One Way to Dance. 

The below is taken from the back cover copy: 

In the linked essays that make up her debut collection, This Is One Way to Dance, Sejal Shah explores culture, language, family, and place. Through the book, Shah reflects on what it means to make oneself visible and legible through writing in a country that struggles with race and maps her identity as an American, Asian American, writer of color, and feminist. She draws on ongoing interests in ethnicity and place: the geographic and cultural distances between people, both real and imagined. Her memoir in essays emerges as she wrestles with her experiences growing up and living in Western New York, an area of stark racial and economic segregation, as the daughter of Gujarati immigrants. This Is One Way to Dance introduces a vital new voice to the conversation about race and belonging in America. 

Dance was named a Best Book of 2020 by NPR, was recommended in The New York Times, and was a finalist for the CLMP Firecracker Award in nonfiction and was a silver medalist in the Independent Publisher "IPPY" Awards.  

Item Description: A slim and accessible book of 25 collected essays about time, race, childhood, weddings, Indian food, teachers, dating the wrong person, missing a friend who shaped my life, depression, a love of postcards and correspondence, a fear of Ohio, ambivalence about jewelry, and voicetexting with my mother. The cover of this paperback is a chuniya chori, a Gujarati outfit, in motion, turning. My mother told me the best part of my book is the cover but she wished that I was on it (it's a still of a video of me twirling, but you see the flare of the skirt, not me). It's red-orange, with a blue and gold border. It's 8.5" by 5.5."

• Name : Sejal Shah