Lakshmi Iyer writes creative nonfiction and fiction from southeastern Pennsylvania.
Her essay collection The Smudged Hyphen (2026) traces the arc of a transracial adoptive family through questions of identity, race, and belonging. Her novels A Star Keeps Its Distance and Hindsight, and her children’s book Why Is My Hair Curly?, are available wherever books are sold.
Her family’s story is the subject of the feature documentary Love Chaos Kin (2025), directed by Chithra Jeyaram. She is at work on a memoir.
Her writing has appeared in The Hindu, Verve India, Motherwell Magazine, Adoptive Families, and PopSugar. She has been featured on NPR’s The Takeaway and BBC Asia.
She holds a certificate in creative writing from The Writer’s Studio at Simon Fraser University.
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Recent Essays
- The Morning I Downloaded VS CodeSix in the morning. The study. The Instant Pot was set for rice. Saathi was at tennis. The girls were somewhere in the house with… Read more: The Morning I Downloaded VS Code
- Two Hours on a Monday MorningTwo days before, my morning briefing arrived in the format it had been taking all week. A plain text summary in my inbox at seven… Read more: Two Hours on a Monday Morning
- Nine Point Six PercentI was browsing the settings menu in Claude Desktop. Not hunting. Just opening drawers, like you would in a kitchen looking for scissors. Under a… Read more: Nine Point Six Percent