Annika Sharma - Author & Podcaster On Building A Career As A Creative & Discussing Complicated Topics

Annika has built a career with her love for health and for words. With an M.Ed from Penn State and a MPH from George Washington University, she currently serves as a Communications Project Manager at Weill Cornell Medicine. In that role, she helped build the comms strategy for the Office of the Research Dean and to revamp the website for the health system’s research arm. Aside from this work, Annika is an author and a content creator. She has a three-book deal for a series called The Chai Masala Club, which focuses on a fictional group of friends and their travails in love. The first of those books, Love, Chai, and Other Four Letter Words, came out October 2021. She is also a founder and co-host of The Woke Desi podcast, which explores hushed topics within the South Asian community. In this episode we talk about creating and using her pen name instead of her birth name, Sribindu Pisupati. She reflects on how her career as a writer has evolved as she moved into a management role, and compares writing for a medical institution against writing fictional novels. Lastly, we talk about why she dove into the podcast medium despite starting her career as a writer and what she’s learned in the process.