Sunil Yapa’s first novel Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of a Fist (2016) found its way onto many “best” lists, including  Time Magazine’s Best Books of the Year, Amazon Best Books of the Year, Barnes & Noble’s Discover Great New Writers , and American Booksellers January 2016 Indie Next Great Reads. The biracial son of a Sri Lankan father and a mother from Montana, Yapa has lived around the world, including The Netherlands, Thailand, Greece, Guatemala, Argentina, Chile, China, and India, as well as London, Montreal, and New York City. His writing has appeared in Guernica, American Short Fiction, The Margins, Hyphen Magazine, The Tottenville Review, Pindeldyboz: Stories that Defy Classification, and others. Sunil Yapa holds a BA in economic geography from Penn State University, and received his MFA in Fiction from Hunter College in New York City.

Sunil Yapa is also the featured writer for the 2018 Centre County Reads/CALS Community Read, which features additional events focused on the novel and activist literature and art. (More information on the CALS website. )