About the Artist
Vijaya Sundaram is a Medford-based published poet of East Indian origin. She has also written plays and short stories, and has been working on and off on a few magic-realist/fantasy/myth novellas.
After teaching middle school English at a public school in the Greater Boston area for seventeen years, she left to pursue writing, and to home-school her daughter. During that time, she made a brief foray into the local theatre scene (stage-management, singing, and acting). Over the years, she has also written songs, for which she composed music, as well as played guitar. As a child and teenager, she studied South Indian classical music, as well as North Indian Sitar music (the latter with Pt. Janardan Mitta, who is a disciple of Sitar Maestro Pt. Ravi Shankar). Later, she studied Hindustani classical vocal music with Pt. Shreeram G. Devasthali of Pune.
Currently, she is an Assistant Professor in the English/Humanities department in the local community college, and a home-schooling Poetry and Literature teacher. Her work has appeared in publications like The Rising Phoenix Press, the Stardust Review, and TELL Magazine, among others. She has performed poetry readings at the local community college, as well as in various Medford-based events, along with fellow Medford poets.
Vijaya performed as a singer and poet on WBUR, WGBH and WMFO during the 1990s, and was recently interviewed on Medford TV.
In the summer of 2023, Vijaya Sundaram was appointed as the Poet Laureate of Medford, MA (Medford’s second Poet Laureate). In late August 2023, her first chapbook of poems was published by Červená Barva Press.