USHA AKELLA is an internationally known poet who was selected as a cultural ambassador for Austin in 2014-15. 

THE ROSARY OF LATITUDES is a collection of prose and poetry inspired by travel.  In the foreword Keki Daruwalla comments, "If you are writing ‘travel poetry’ then you need, apart from acute sensitivity, a handful of varied talents: empathy, a feel for people and place, and the alchemy of language to go with it to transform the place into something else. Usha Akella (if one has to call her a writer of travel poetry) is blessed with most of these attributes." In the afterword Ravi Shankar commends, "That notion, of the universality of poetry, is given rapturous embodiment by this book by Usha Akella, which literally traverses the globe, from continent to continent, drawing a string around the world the way a God might, a true maker, which is, after all, the etymological derivation of the very word ‘poet.’ It takes a certain kind of person to remain open to so many cultures, so many tongues, and the speaker of these varied poems is just such a being — porous, open-hearted, ever seeking for that pulse of spiritual energy that exists at the border of space-time and culture, and our immersion in all of it simultaneously.”

She is also the founder of ‘The Poetry Caravan’ in Austin, TX and Greenburg, NY. The Caravan offers readings and workshops to the disadvantaged in women’s shelters, AIDS Centers, senior homes and hospitals. She also writes travel articles, whimsical prose and interviews artists, poets and scholars. She edits a yearly Diaspora issue for www.museindia.com, and is the festival director and producer of Matwaala, the first South Asian Diaspora Poetry Fest held in Austin, August 2015.