Supriya: American as Paneer Pie is the story of Lekha who is the only Indian American kid in a small town in Michigan. Lekha feels like she has two versions of herself. There's home Lekha who loves watching Bollywood movies and eating Indian food. Then there's school Lekha who pins her hair over her bindi birthmark and avoids confrontation at all costs, especially when it comes to being teased for her Indian culture. When a racist incident rocks their small town, Lekha must choose whether to continue to remain silent or find her voice and speak out against hate. Like Lekha, I grew up in a small town in Michigan. I wasn’t the only South Asian America kid in town, but it was not a diverse town at all. There were daily incidents of microaggressions and othering. We had a rock thrown through our window. I have the same hair as Lekha, really big, thick, curly hair. Even in the Desi community, which is a South Asian diaspora, there's really a preference towards silky, wavy hair. Curly hair is not the beauty standard. In my town, that also was not the beauty standard because very few, if any, people had hair like mine. People would walk by and touch my hair, tap it as they walked by. Someone wrote "Put a comb in that rat's nest" in Sharpie on my locker. A lot of those incidents that are in the book are straight from my life. I adjusted them to Lekha's story. When I first saw the cover by Abigail Dela Cruz and designer Laura Lyn DiSena, I was so floored. There's this picture I put up on Instagram that's me. I was like, that looks exactly like me on the cover. I used to tie my hair back in a bun because people would touch it and people would make fun of it. I didn't take my hair out, I didn't wear my curls out until I was thirty-eight, like a year and a half ago.