We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Bindiya Schaefer. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Bindiya below.

Hi Bindiya, thanks for joining us today. Do you have an agent or someone (or a team) that helps you secure opportunities and compensation for your creative work? How did you meet you, why did you decide to work with them, why do you think they decided to work with you?

I signed with my agent, Ismita Hussain, from Great Dog Literary in June 2022 after participating in APIpit in early May! And, the funny thing is, I almost didn’t do APIpit. If a friend hadn’t reminded me, I would have totally missed out and Ismita and I might have never met…isn’t it funny how things work out?

I decided to work with Ismita after hearing her feedback and vision for my YA fantasy, The Djinn’s Curse, which is a set in an Alt-Arabia. I had three fulls out with other agents but none of them were able to match Ismita’s level of feedback–she noticed things the other agents didn’t and she had concrete suggestions for improvement. The Djinn’s Curse is steeped in Middle Eastern mythology and draws inspiration from the more obscure A Thousand and One Nights stories, and it was amazing to talk to someone who also grew up with the same stories I did!

And, that’s how I knew Ismita was the right champion for my book.

Bindiya, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I was always a storyteller. I started my career as a journalist covering the global defense and aerospace industry in Bangalore, India but after seven years of that, I decided it was time for a change. So I came over to the dark side: marketing for tech companies in the SF Bay Area. That was five years ago and around that time, my interests and ideas of the world around me shifted quite a bit and as a result, I found myself craving books that weren’t readily available in bookstores. Or, I should say, simply didn’t exist.

So, I decided to write them myself. I wanted to read books about characters who looked like me, who lived in the parts of the world that I did, who overcame life’s challenges.

My writing is inspired by the challenges I faced growing up in a patriarchal society, struggles with mental health and my deep love for the great outdoors. As a result my stories are woven with diverse threads of knowledge, takes of resilience, and immersive settings.

I’m incredibly proud of my first novel, CORINTH 2642 AD. Writing this book was probably one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. Not because I was writing fiction but because of the subject matter. CORINTH 2642 AD is an adult sci-fi novel that tackles race as a construct, it envisions a world where people are truly equal and it follows the story of a man experiencing racism for the first time.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?

When I was a kid, growing up in Dubai, I never read any books written by people of color or had main characters who were people of color. The libraries, bookstores and even the book aisle in the supermarket was exclusively stocked with books written by white authors for white readers.

And while they were wonderful escapes from reality, it wasn’t really something I could connect with. I didn’t see myself in Victorian England or a post-apocalyptic New York and definitely not as the Princess of Genovia.

That’s why I write. My goal is to tell stories of about a whole new world for food, cultures, places and even monsters that people have never heard about. I want little brown kids to pick up my books and see themselves in the characters and places! Books do more to shatter stereotypes than people realize and my goal is to do it one page at a time!

Contact Info:

• Website: www.bindiyaschaefer.com
• Instagram: @bindiyaschaefer
• Facebook: @bindiyaschaefer
• Twitter: @bindiyaschaefer