Sameer Pandya was born in India and came to California when he was eight. He earned a BA in History from the University of California, Davis and his PhD from the Program in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford University.

Sameer is a fiction writer and a scholar of literature and sport. His fiction has appeared, among other places, in Narrative,Other Voices, and Faultline, and his non-fiction has appeared in The Atlantic, ESPN, Salon, Sports Illustrated, and the New York Daily News.  His scholarly essays have appeared in South Asian Popular Culture and Amerasia.    

His first collection, The Blind Writer: Stories and a Novella, follows the lives of first- and second-generation Indian Americans living in contemporary California.  The characters share a similar sensibility: a sense that immigration is a distant memory, yet an experience that continues to shape the decisions they make in subtle and surprising ways as they go about the complicated business of everyday living.

He is at work on a novel and a scholarly project on South Asian diasporic sport.

He currently a  lecturer in the Department of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.