Priyanka “Anki” Sinha was born on June 28, 1973 in Doha, Qatar. Their father was from Bangladesh and their mother was from India, so they were born into an Indian nationality and grew up in a tight-knit Hindi nuclear household with their parents and older brother. Because their father worked in Indian foreign service, they grew up traveling to different diverse communities and speaking English at home. 

At five years old, Anki started feeling a sense of otherness around their gender and sexuality. They had always been a tomboy, much to their mother’s dismay, and at around 10-11 years old they started realizing that they were romantically attracted to other girls. Around then, they encountered a sculpture of an Arhanaari, a god and goddess fused into one form called a “half-woman,” and they realized that they, too, were both man and woman. 

For Anki’s first year in college, they attended school in Delhi, where they began coming into their sense of self around their lesbian identity. Anki picked up literature by Adrienne Rich for the first time in their college library, and felt liberation and connection for the first time through Rich and other queer writers and poets. A year later, in 1992, they moved to the University of Illinois, Chicago, as their father’s job posting switched to Chicago. At UIC, they became involved with the student pride group and began taking part in political demonstrations for the first time. They struggled to balance being out and proud wearing queer accessories and participating in public demonstrations at school, while also living with parents who wanted to have a say in what they wore at home. 

In the later 1990s, Anki was inspired by the growing numbers of South Asian women, such as Urvashi Vaid, rising into LGBTQ+ leadership and gaining visibility as writers. They joined Khuli Zaban, a South Asian lesbian and bisexual organization that has since expanded membership to all queer identities. Anki appreciated having a space where AFAB (assigned female at birth) queer people could gather, amidst a very strong gay male-dominated movement. Through Urvashi Vaid, Anki participated in Pride Marches, did community outreach, and hosted film screenings, poetry readings, and writing spaces.

At 20 years old, Anki came out as a lesbian to their parents through a written letter. Since then, they had difficult patches of feeling distant and being disconnected from their family, as everyone tried to navigate Anki not living the way their parents had hoped they would. After a decades-long journey, Anki’s parents eventually came to be loving towards them but not openly talk about their queerness with them. 

Anki continued to explore their sexual and gender identities through a series of long-term relationships with women. They’ve navigated experiencing verbal and physical homophobic and transphobic violence for holding a partner’s hand in public. They’ve celebrated same sex marriage being passed, and getting married and divorced. Anki has also been on a decades-long journey to come to terms with speaking openly about their neurodivergence and mental health journey, coming to terms with the western psychiatric system alongside ancestral and collective traumas.

Now, Anki remains passionate about their primary work in communications — they’ve worked comms across nonprofit, corporate, and academic fields. They also are working on a Master’s in acupuncture, as they explore oriental medicine and healing arts. In their free time, they love meditation, literature, and spending time with their partner.