Reema Rao-Patel is a Konkani American writer from Chicago. She has been nominated twice for Best of the Net 2024 and longlisted for The Masters Review Anthology XII Prize and The Masters Review 2022 Summer Short Story Award. Her work can be found or is forthcoming in Hayden's Ferry Review, The Los Angeles Review, Witness, The Lumiere Review, Flash Frog, and elsewhere. She will be a 2024 Roots.Wounds.Words. Fellow and is an alumna of Tin House, Kenyon Review, American Short Fiction, and the Key West Literary Seminar workshops. She is a fiction reader for Split Lip Magazine and is currently working on her first short story collection, exploring "shades of shame" in the Indian diaspora. In between drafts, she is teaching both her pup and baby to roll over.