Debora Curry
English Dept - Administrative Assistant
Email: debora.curry@gcccd.edu
Office Hours: Monday-Friday 8am to 10am and 2pm to 4pm - email Debora for link for her Zoom Office hours
Source: The Gallery: A 35th Anniversary Photographic Directory of the Grossmont-Cuyamaca Community Faculty, Administration, and Staff. El Cajon, CA: Grossmont-Cuyamaca Community College District, 1996. p72.
Source: Document Collections and Photographic Archives of the Grossmont College English Department. El Cajon, CA: Grossmont-Cuyamaca Community College District.
Source: English Department Gallery Photos. Private Photograph and Documents Collection. Copyright Homer B. Lusk. Digitally reprinted with permission, courtesy of Homer Lusk, Grossmont College Professor Emeritus and former English Department Chair.
Born in Chandigarh, India, Kamla K. Kapur (a.k.a. Kamal Kapur) received her Bachelor’s Degree in 1970 at Chandigarh’s Government College for Women. Motivated by her love for literature and writing, she then used her dowry money to pursue graduate studies in Kent, Ohio, earning a Master's Degree in English and American Literature from Kent State University in 1974, after which time she remained in the U.S. and obtained dual citizenship.
For the next eighteen years, in addition to being a freelance writer for newspapers in India and teaching English literature at Delhi University, she became a prolific writer of poetry, short stories and drama, published in a variety of journals with translations in Hindi as well as in Punjabi, the language of her ancestors. Many of her dramatic works were not only successfully produced, but award-winning, particularly in India. She was the recipient of The Sultan Padamsee Award for Playwriting in English for her play Kaamiya in 1977, the same year her acclaimed Zanana was produced at New Delhi’s National School of Drama; her bi-lingual play, The Curlew's Cry, was produced in New Delhi in 1982; and Heth Vagai Dariaa (Clytemnestra) was produced in Punjabi translation by The Company in Chandigarh in 1980. In the United States, Clytemnestra and her two other full-length plays, Kepler Dreams and Hamlet's Father, were featured at the Marin Shakespeare Festival in San Francisco, New York’s Dramatic Risks Theatre Group, and San Diego’s Gas Lamp Quarter Theatre.
Partly in response to the success of her play Clytemnestra, the New Mexico Arts Division selected Kapur in 1985 to be its playwright in residence. At the end of that residency in 1987, she published her first collection of poetry in the U.S., Radha Sings (Rolling Drum and Dark Child Press, USA, 1987). Over the years, though, her poetry has appeared in a variety of journals and anthologies in the U.S. and India, including Berkeley’s Yellow Silk, the Journal of Literature and Aesthetics, and, more recently, Our Feet Walk the Sky (Aunt Lute Press). Kapur was also a Nimrod/Hardman Pablo Neruda Prize semi-finalist.
At the end of her New Mexico residency, she relocated to San Diego and in 1990 was invited by Chair Homer Lusk to begin teaching part-time for the Grossmont College English Department. Two years later, in 1992, she joined the faculty permanently as a literature and creative writing instructor, where she remained on staff for the next eighteen years.
While at Grossmont, Kamla was also taking on-line classes from the Iowa University and University of California, San Diego, ostensibly to improve her salary opportunities at Grossmont, but in the process further cultivating her developing collections of poetry and fiction. Her poems from that period eventually became the acclaimed collection, As a Fountain In a Garden (Tarang Press 2005), about her late husband's tragic suicide in August 1993. In her teaching life, Kamla taught a variety of composition classes, but also offered literature courses such as Mythology, Shakespeare, Masterpieces of Drama, and Images of Women in Literature. As a member of the Grossmont College Creative Writing Program, she taught courses in introductory level creative writing, Poetry Writing, and Creative Non-fiction workshops; she also developed the Creative Writing Program’s first Playwriting workshops, which she taught until 1998. By 2005, however, dividing more of her time to living in India and wanting to devote more of her energies to her writing, Kamla announced her retirement from Grossmont in 2006.
In retired, Kapur's career did, indeed, flourish as she had hoped: she amassed an international reputation as a poet, playwright, and re-imaginer of traditional Indian mythologies and folktales, including published three critically acclaimed books of fiction in India.
Publication ongoing; current as of most recent dated of posting.
Debora Curry
English Dept - Administrative Assistant
Email: debora.curry@gcccd.edu
Office Hours: Monday-Friday 8am to 10am and 2pm to 4pm - email Debora for link for her Zoom Office hours
8800 Grossmont College Drive
El Cajon, California 92020
619-644-7000
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