Shankar Vedantam is a national staff writer at The Washington Post. Besides journalism, Vedantam also writes fiction and plays. His short stories have been published in Rosebud magazine and Catamaran magazine. Tom, Dick & Harriet, a play he coauthored with Donald C. Drake, was produced in Philadelphia at the Brick Playhouse in April 2004. Vedantam’s second play,
Flying While Brown, was about civil liberties in America after the 9/11 attacks. The winner of numerous awards and fellowships, Vedantam is also the author of When Violence Masquerades as Virtue: A Brief History of Terrorism, part of the 2003 book Violence or Dialogue, published by the International Psychoanalytic Association. The Ghosts of Kashmir is Vedantam’s first collection of short stories.