Amitava Kumar is an Indian writer and journalist who is Professor of English on the Helen D. Lockwood Chair at Vassar College.

Kumar has been a Fiction Fellow at the Norman Mailer Writers Colony, a Barach Fellow at the Wesleyan Writers Festival, and has received awards from the South Asian Journalists Association for three consecutive years. In addition, he has been awarded research fellowships from the NEH, Yale University, SUNY-Stony Brook, Dartmouth College, and University of California-Riverside. A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Bomb was also judged the Best Non-Fiction Book of the Year in the Asian American Literary Awards.