Mrinalini Levin-Srinivasan and Shobha Tharoor Srinivasan - BIRD/DOG

Brazos welcomes Mrinalini Levin-Srinivasan and Shobha Tharoor Srinivasan on Monday, October 26 to discuss their book Bird/Dog. The authors will be in conversation with DaQuon Wilson. What does home mean to you? Is it a place where you are safe? The freedom to go wherever you please? Or the people who understand you?High above, Bird roams the open sky but dreams of having a home. Down below, Dog has a family, yet longs to discover life beyond the fence. When their separate adventures lead them away from everything familiar, both must navigate uncertainty, new relationships and the surprising ways in which friendship can appear.Told through two very different perspectives, Bird/Dog is a warm and hopeful story about freedom, belonging, individuality and finding your place in the world.Copies of Bird/Dog will be available for purchase at the event. Mrinalini Levin-Srinivasan is a student at Lanier Middle School in Houston, Texas. A highly motivated young writer, Mrinalini benefited from the isolation of the pandemic years, when she found herself reading for hours daily. She is currently a Speech and Debate Team Captain, Lanier Leader, and member of the National Junior Honors Society. She has won numerous writing and speaking competitions at the University Interscholastic League and is the founder of a Banned Books Club. Mrinalini has studied bharatanatyam, Carnatic music, and the clarinet, and is a competitive swimmer with HTX Swims. She has lived in six U.S. states and two countries.Shobha Tharoor Srinivasan is an award-winning author of 15 books for children and adults, published in India and the United States, and the recipient of India’s 2022 National Film Award for Best Narration. Her acclaimed works include It’s Time to Rhyme, winner of PublishingNext’s Children’s Book of the Year 8+ (2022), and Prince with a Paintbrush: The Story of Raja Ravi Varma. She writes fiction, nonfiction, poetry and picture books, with her work appearing in international journals and anthologies. A frequent speaker at literary festivals, Shobha divides her time between California and India, drawing on her cross-cultural experiences as a proud global citizen.DaQuon Wilson is a PhD student in the English department at Rice University, where he studies African American and Black Diasporic literature with an emphasis on children’s literature and social justice. Before coming to Rice, DaQuon worked with Scholastic Book Clubs and earned a B.A. from Emory University.