This Is One Way to Dance
Essays on Race, Place, & Belonging
In the linked essays that make up her award-winning debut collection, This Is One Way to Dance, Sejal Shah explores identity, culture, family, and place. Throughout the book, Shah reflects on what it means to make oneself visible and legible through writing in a country that struggles with race and maps herself as an American, Asian American, writer of color, and feminist.
This Is One Way to Dance introduces a vital new voice to the conversation about race and belonging in America.
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Praise
“Each of these pieces captures what it means to be a citizen of a country that may never claim you as its own, to imagine your own brilliant fullness beyond its peripheral gaze.”
—Mira Jacob, author of Good Talk: A Memoir in Conversations
“A phenomenal first book that travels decades in its excavation, Sejal Shah’s This Is One Way to Dance was well worth the wait. The body in ecstatic dance is a bridge and also an estuary in this prose, equally ecstatic in its precision and its vulnerability.”
—Dawn Lundy Martin, author of Good Stock Strange Blood
“Sejal Shah’s lyrical This Is One Way to Dance deftly explores what it means to be “American” in our increasingly diverse nation. The writing is vivid, Shah’s observations are nimble and wise, and the result is a book that is both thoughtful and thought-provoking.”
—Dinty W. Moore, author of Between Panic & Desire
“This is a sensitive, poignant collection.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“The poetic, probing debut from short story writer and essayist Shah forcefully tackles the complicated intersection of identity, language, movement, family, place, and race.”
—Publishers Weekly (read full review)