Michigan State University Associate Professor Divya Victor received a national Creative Capital Award for literature to support development of her upcoming book of essays, “Kin.” Victor is part of the MSU Department of English and director of the Creative Writing Program.
Creative Capital awarded $2.45 million in project grants to 55 artists, including Victor, to support the creation of groundbreaking new works in visual arts, film and moving image, technology, performing arts, and literature. The 2025 awardees receive up to $50,000 per project and were selected from more than 5,600 applications across the United States.
Victor was one of five recipients of the 2025 Creative Capital Award for literature. In recent years, the award for literature has gone to authors including Paul Beatty for “The Sellout,” Ben Marcus for “The Flame Alphabet” and Legacy Russell for “Black Meme: A History of the Images That Make Us.”
“This is a profound moment to invest in the powerful imaginations of artists,” said Angela Mattox, director of artist initiatives for Creative Capital, in the award announcement. “These 55 visionary artist proposals are boldly pushing form and ideas forward.”
Victor’s literature project “Kin” will culminate in a published collection of essays exploring how South Asian American culture, pleasure and creativity influence and reflect a broader sense of national belonging in the United States. The book will be published in 2027 by Graywolf Press, which has also published works including “Telephone” by Percival Everett, “The Argonauts” by Maggie Nelson and “Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric” by Claudia Rankine.
“Kin” is a follow-up to Victor’s book of poetry and prose, “CURB,” that framed immigrant grief through post 9/11 anti-Asian sentiments and violence in America. “CURB” received the PEN Open Book Award and Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award in 2022.
“We’re at a cultural moment in the United States where it’s really important for immigrant life and the life of the descendants of immigrants in this country to be seen not only through the lens of trauma, but through the lens of all the other aspects of life that are so central to us — joy, happiness, pleasure, solidarity, aesthetic vision, and imagination,” Victor said.
The essays in “Kin” will combine Victor’s Tamil-Indian girlhood, her grandmother’s experiences and the national influence of South Asian Americans in visual art, literature, photography, architecture and filmmaking.
“I’m trying to honor a kind of unacknowledged expertise that girls have about living on this planet, and also the unacknowledged wisdom of our elders, to bring both these frameworks of knowing in contact with what an academic might know about history and culture,” she said.
“I want this book to create kinship among people within the South Asian American diaspora, but also between those who see themselves outside of it. I want to extend the possibility of kinship across these silos, these communal groups.”
Victor will use the Creative Capital Award to travel for research and time for writing. Research will include materials in the South Asian American Digital Archive on Anandabai Joshee and Mary Kukde, the first Indian women to earn their medical degrees in the United States, and on Kala Bagai, the first American immigration advocate to wear a sari while participating in her activism.
Additionally, Victor will examine the papers of Hungarian American photographer Balthazar Korab with his photos of Minoru Yamasaki’s World Trade Center models and documents connected with Bangladeshi American architect Fazlur Rahman Khan who designed the Sears Tower (now called the Willis Tower) and John Hancock Center in Chicago.
Through “Kin,” Victor aims to illuminate commonality among all Americans and wants the South Asian American community especially to recognize their experiences and pleasures through these essays.
“The hope in a writer’s life is that they’re always providing a fuller, richer picture of the lives they know,” she said. “When we see our lives represented in books, we feel more real to ourselves, and that gives us this kind of wonderful distance, this enriching distance, between how we experience our own life and how we witness our life from the outside. In that distance so much is possible, so much strength, so much formation of solidarity.”
