Contours of the Heart comes at a critical time. The last fifteen years have seen a dramatic increase in the number of South Asian immigrants to the U.S., with an increasingly visible second generation trying to create a space in which to explore their identity and their relationship to their parents' homeland. Against this backdrop, this anthology of fiction, essays, poetry, and photography focuses on the transformative experiences that lead individuals to declare new forms of belonging in North America.

Abraham Verghese, author of My Own Country: A Doctor's Story of a Town and Its People in the Age of AIDS, wrote the foreword. The afterword is written by the well-known scholar Sucheta Mazumdar, ahistorian at Duke University. Other contributors include Meena Alexander, Agha Shahid Ali, Chitra Divakaruni, Ginu Kamani, Shani Mootoo, Shyam Selvadurai, Vijay Seshadri, and Bapsi Sidhwa. The anthology is edited by Sunaina Maira and Rajini Srikanth.