Vijay Seshadri (born 1954) is a Brooklyn, New York-based poet, essayist, and literary critic of significant repute.
He was born in India and came to the United States in 1959 at the age of five. He grew up in Columbus, Ohio and has lived in many parts of the United States, including the Northwest and the Upper West Side of Manhattan where he was a sometime graduate student in the Ph.D. program in Middle Eastern Languages and Literature at Columbia University.
Seshadri's poems, essays, and reviews have appeared in AGNI, Antaeus, Boulevard, Epiphany, The Nation, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Paris Review, Shenandoah, Southwest Review, The Threepenny Review, Verse, and Western Humanities Review. A collection of his poetry, Wild Kingdom, was published in the spring of 1996 by Graywolf Press.
He has received grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts. He has been awarded The Paris Review's Bernard F. Conners Long Poem Prize, the MacDowell Colony's Fellowship for Distinguished Poetic Achievement, a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the James Laughlin Award for his second collection, The Long Meadow (2003).
Vijay Seshadri holds an A.B. degree from Oberlin College and an M.F.A. from Columbia University. He is a former member of the editorial staff of the New Yorker magazine and has taught at the MFA Writing Seminars at Bennington College. He currently teaches poetry and is the director of the graduate non-fiction writing program at Sarah Lawrence College.