Author of
Governing Bodies: A Memoir, A Confluence, A Watershed (Milkweed Editions, 2025)
Sangamithra Iyer is an environmental planner, engineer and writer. She is the recipient of a Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant, a Café Royal Foundation Literature Grant, and the Diamonstein-Spielvogel Fellowship at the New York Public Library for this book. Sangu was an Emerging Writer Fellow at Aspen Summer Words, a finalist for the Siskiyou Prize for New Environmental Literature, and a recipient of a Pushcart Prize. She has also received support from the Jerome and Camargo Foundations. Sangu served as an editor of Satya magazine and as an associate for the environmental public policy action tank, Brighter Green. She is the founder of the Literary Animal Project, a habitat for conversations about how we portray animal lives on the page. She has devoted her career to watershed protection, wildlife coexistence, nature-based stormwater solutions and sustainable cities. Sangu holds a B.E. in Civil Engineering from The Cooper Union, an M.S. in Geotechnical Engineering from U.C. Berkeley, and an MFA in Creative Writing from Hunter College. She lives in New York with her husband, Wan, and rescued pit bull, Asta.
SangamithraIyer.com
Sangamithra Iyer
Books by Sangamithra
As a civil engineer, Sangamithra Iyer knows about resilience from studying soils and water. As an animal rights activist, she advocates for a revolution in how we value and relate to other species. And as the child of immigrants from India, she searches for submerged histories.
Animated by a series of questions—How do we disentangle ourselves from systems of harm? Is it possible to grasp the scale of planetary sorrow and emerge with truth and love as our guides, rather than despair? What is the relationship between individual action and systemic change?—Governing Bodies takes the form of the confluence of three meandering rivers, each written as a letter. Addressing the first of them to her grandfather, Iyer assembles the story of a man who embraced Gandhi’s philosophy and went to work developing wells in Tamil Nadu. In a second letter, addressed to her father, she explores their shared interest in cultivating compassion for all beings. And then in a final letter, addressed to readers, she braids these explorations of her familial past with her own experiences as a woman of color and citizen of the world, always seeking ways to move beyond resignation and restore flow.
A lyrical story of lineages and an urgently needed reckoning with the ways bodies are both controlled and liberated, this is an essential book for our time.