• Anchor; 1st edition 1997

• Paperback

• 114 pages

• Used

Before she began her career in fiction writing, Divakaruni was an award winning  poet. She writes poems encompassing a wide variety of themes, including nature, history, myth, art. the immigrant experience and South Asian women, and focuses often on the joys and struggles of women trying to find their own identities.

Leaving Yuba City is unique because it includes series of poems based on and inspired by various art forms, including paintings , photographs and film.

With these poems, Divakaruni once again shows how boundaries can be destroyed, as she illustrates how different art forms are not independent entities, but how they can, in fact, influence each other. She  begins with devastatingly eloquent evocations of childhood, then moves on to imaginative and compelling poems inspired by the photographs of Raghubir Singh, paintings by Francesco Clemente, and films by Indian directors, including Satyajit Ray and Mira Nair. In the final section, she dramatizes the circumscribed lives of persecuted Punjab farmers who immigrated early in this century to Yuba City, California. Strongly narrative, shimmeringly detailed, and emotionally acute, these poems will stay with you.

Poems from Leaving Yuba City have won a Pushcart Prize, an Allen Ginsberg prize and a Gerbode Foundation award.

One of the poems in this collection, "Woman with Kite," has been chosen by filmmaker Yunah Hong-- to be part of her documentary film, Between the Lines: Asian American Women's Poetry. The film also includes an interview with Divakaruni.

Born in Kolkata, India, she came to the United States for her graduate studies, receiving a Master’s degree in English from Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio, and a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley.

To earn money for her education, she held many odd jobs, including babysitting, selling merchandise in an Indian boutique, slicing bread in a bakery, and washing instruments in a science lab. At Berkeley, she lived in the International House and worked in the dining hall. She briefly lived in Illinois and Ohio, but has spent most of her life in Northern California, which she often writes about. She currently lives in Houston, Texas, which has begun to appear in her writing.

Divakaruni teaches in the nationally ranked Creative Writing program at the University of Houston, where she is the Betty and Gene McDavid Professor of Creative Writing. She serves on the Advisory board of Maitri in the San Francisco Bay Area and Daya in Houston. Both are organizations that help South Asian or South Asian American women who find themselves in abusive or domestic violence situations. She served on the board of Pratham, an organization that helps educate underprivileged children in India, for many years and is currently on their emeritus board.