Literary Safari

Sandhya Nankani

NB-Team.jpg

Sandhya Nankani, Principal and Founder

An award-winning producer, author, editor, publishing consultant, and thought leader, Sandhya founded Literary Safari in 2008. She has over two decades of experience conceptualizing, developing, and publishing engaging and educational digital and print content and curriculum for children and adults. In all her work, she has been guided by the varied and interdisciplinary entrepreneurial experiences she had early on in her career, whether it was running a college learning center, teaching Writing Composition to college freshmen, operating a family business in men’s retail, or working as a journalist and editor both in the US and overseas.

Sandhya is passionate about creating inclusive media for children and families and over the past decade has produced three apps, a podcast, and a podcast activity book—Dentist Bird, Grandma’s Great Gourd, HangArt: A Literacy App, and The Story Seeds Podcast. These properties have been licensed to educational and entertainment platforms, including Playaway, Pinna, Listenwise, and Yoto. Over the years, Sandhya has also edited the award-winning Writing for Teens magazine, been a literature fellow for the Asian American Writers Workshop, collaborated with Google for Educators, authored hi-low and leveled fiction and nonfiction readers for Heinemann's Fountas & Pinnell programs, developed several middle school ELA programs, and written curriculum for the New York Times Learning Network, PBS, and Sesame Workshop. Her writing have been published in The Lily (Washington Post), Quartz, Ms. Magazine, Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop blog, Toca Boca Magazine, Sepia Mutiny, and the Routledge Handbook of Media Education Futures Post-Pandemic. She is the editor of the multidisciplinary anthology Breaking the Silence: Domestic Violence in the South Asian American Community and a memoir/biography Moments with a Master: Meetings with Dada JP Vaswani. She has presented at international conferences including Google EdFoo, PBS Learning Day, Games for Change Festival, OMEP (Organisation Mondiale pour l’Education Préscolaire/World Organisation for Early Childhood Education and Care) World Conference, UNESCO Forum on Global Citizenship Education and hosted/produced live author Q&As for Parents Magazine, LitWorld, and public libraries.

Born in Ghana and raised there, in India, and in the United States, Sandhya holds an undergraduate degree in History and a Masters of International and Public Affairs from Columbia University. An alumni of Scholastic Education and Weekly Reader classroom magazines, she was a founding member of KIDMAP (Kids' Inclusive and Diverse Media Action Project), a grassroots coalition of children’s media professionals committed to representation in digital content for children, has served on the Education Committee of the Museum of Arts and Design (MAD) in New York City, and is president of the board of trustees of her local public library in New Jersey. She has served on award committees for Good Housekeeping’s Best Books Awards, the Cybil Awards, and the Japan Prize.