Sunu Chandy

Sunu P. Chandy (she/her) is a social justice activist through her work as a poet and a civil rights attorney. She lives in Washington, D.C. with her family, and is the daughter of immigrants to the U.S. from Kerala, India. Sunu’s collection of poems, My Dear Comrades, was selected for the 2021 Terry J. Cox Prize, and published by Regal House in the Spring of 2023. Sunu’s work can also be found in publications including Asian American Literary Review, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Poets on Adoption, Split this Rock’s online social justice database, The Quarry, and in anthologies including The Penguin Book of Indian Poets, The Long Devotion: Poets Writing Motherhood and This Bridge We Call Home: Radical Visions for Transformation. Sunu has served on many boards of directors and is currently on the board of the Transgender Law Center. Sunu started out as a union-side labor and employment lawyer in NYC, and has now worked for several years as a civil rights attorney, including as a litigator with EEOC for 15 years. Following her tenure as legal director of the National Women’s Law Center, in September 2023 Sunu joined Democracy Forward as a Senior Advisor. Sunu is a graduate of Northeastern Law School and Earlham College, where she majored in Women’s Studies and Peace and Global Studies. She also completed her MFA in poetry at Queens College, City University of New York.