“There is so much to learn on every page. Vulchi has given us a gift, and I am thankful for it.” — Eddie S. Glaude, New York Times Bestselling author of Begin Again

Priya Vulchi is the author of Good Friends: Bonds That Change Us and the World (LegacyLit, April 2025). In Good Friends, she explores friendships across history, continents, and identities to show how friendship can open up new levels of joy and community in your life. Vulchi weaves through Western classical thinkers like Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero, and uncovers the private moments between good friends like James Baldwin, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Yuri Kochiyama, Toni Morrison, and June Jordan. Friendship, she shows, has ripple effects beyond just any two friends; it awakens solidarity and changes in the world.

Vulchi is also the co-author of Tell Me Who You Are (TarcherPerigee, 2019), which features stories from her journey to all 50 U.S. states to interview over five hundred people for their stories about race alongside her friend, Winona Guo. Tell Me Who You Are was called “at once hopeful, raw, and brimming with curiosity, engagement and youthful energy” by the writer Roxane Gay, is one of Kirkus Reviews’ Best Nonfiction of 2019, and it is also among Penguin Random House’s top Common Reads, employed as first-year reading by universities nationwide.

Vulchi was the youngest TED Resident ever, one of Teen Vogue’s 21 Under 21 Young People Changing the World, and one of Bitch Media’s Fifty Most Influential feminists. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, TIME Magazine, Scholastic, Bustle, BBC, and more. She has a Bachelor’s degree from Princeton University in African American Studies and Cognitive Science. Currently, she is a PhD candidate in African and African American Studies at Harvard University as a Presidential Scholar.

Priya's Featured Titles

Good Friends: Bonds That Change Us and the World

Legacy Lit |
Nonfiction

FRIENDSHIP IS THE GREAT LOVE STORY WE’VE BEEN LOOKING FOR.

Friendship is good for your health.

Studies show that loneliness is as deadly as smoking fifteen cigarettes a day.

Still, we are not taught how to be good friends to one another. We cancel plans, lose touch, blame technology, and neglect our non-romantic loved ones. In Good Friends, author Priya Vulchi explores friendships across history, continents, and identities to show how friendship can open up new levels of joy and community in your life.

What is the meaning of friendship, these miraculous bonds with once-strangers? How do you begin friendships? End them? Keep them vibrant? For answers, Vulchi weaves through Western classical thinkers like Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero, and uncovers the private moments between good friends like James Baldwin, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Yuri Kochiyama, Toni Morrison, and June Jordan. Friendship, she shows, has ripple effects beyond just any two friends; it awakens solidarity and changes in the world.

Through her inspiring and impassioned prose, Vulchi entirely reimagines our platonic ties, revealing that friendship, in the right hands, is a brilliant act of love and resistance.

Intimate and engaging, Good Friends offers a resounding cry that friendship is not only vital for our own individual well-being, but for humanity itself. It invites you to be inspired not just by what people do but how people love. It invites you to look at your friends differently and enter a dazzlingly fresh philosophy of human connection.

Tell Me Who You Are: A Road Map for Cultivating Racial Literacy

TarcherPerigee |
Discrimination & Racism

In this deeply inspiring book, Winona Guo and Priya Vulchi recount their experiences talking to people from all walks of life about race and identity on a cross-country tour of America. Spurred by the realization that they had nearly completed high school without hearing any substantive discussion about racism in school, the two young women deferred college admission for a year to collect first-person accounts of how racism plays out in this country every day–and often in unexpected ways.

In Tell Me Who You Are, Guo and Vulchi reveal the lines that separate us based on race or other perceived differences and how telling our stories–and listening deeply to the stories of others–are the first and most crucial steps we can take towards negating racial inequity in our culture. Featuring interviews with over 150 Americans accompanied by their photographs, this intimate toolkit also offers a deep examination of the seeds of racism and strategies for effecting change.

This groundbreaking book will inspire readers to join Guo and Vulchi in imagining an America in which we can fully understand and appreciate who we are.

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Racial Literacy in the 21st Century

1 hour talk: 45 min presentation, 15 min Q&A
Two youth advocates share their journey traveling to all 50 U.S. states in support of racial literacy in American K-12 schools

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Youth Activism in Our Public Schools

1 hour talk: 45 min presentation, 15 min Q&A
Tell Me Who You Are authors share their journey as high school students seeking to make a difference in their community.

Priya’s TED Link

Priya & Winona’s Non-Profit Link

Honors, Awards & Recognition

Youngest resident in the TED Residency Program
Named one of Teen Vogue’s 21 under 21 Young People Changing the World
Two of Bitch Media’s 50 Most Influential Feminists

Media Kit

By clicking the link below you will be directed to a Google Docs Folder
where you can download author photos and cover images.

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