Vandana Khanna was born in New Delhi and attended the University of Virginia and Indiana University, where she earned her MFA. Her first collection,Train to Agra, won the Crab Orchard Review First Book Prize. Her second collection, Afternoon Masala, was the co-winner of the 2014 Miller Williams Arkansas Poetry Prize. Other awards include the Elinor Benedict Poetry Prize from Passage North and the Diode Editions Chapbook Competition. Her work has appeared in The Missouri Review, the New England Review and Prairie Schooner as well as the anthologies Asian American Poetry: The Next Generation and Indivisible: An Anthology of Contemporary South Asian American Poetry.