Daisy Rockwell paints under the takhallus, or alias, Lapata (pronounced 'laapataa'), which is Urdu for "missing," or "absconded," as in "my luggage is missing," or "the bandits have absconded." She posts her paintings regularly to Flickr, and writes for the blog Chapati Mystery. She has shown her work in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Washington, DC, Waterloo, Ontario, and Lenox and North Adams, Massachusetts. Her essays on literature and art have appeared in Bookslut , Caravan and The Sunday Guardian (New Delhi). Rockwell grew up in a family of artists in western Massachusetts, some whose work adorns the surfaces of chinaware and brightens up the waiting rooms of dentists'… offices, and others whose artistic output has found more select audiences. From 1992-2006, she made a detour into academia, from which she emerged with a PhD in South Asian literature, a book on Upendranath Ashk and a mild case of depression. Nonetheless, she sometimes still teaches Hindi. She is the author of two publications from Foxhead Books, THE LITTLE BOOK OF TERROR (2012), a collection of paintings and essays, and the novel, TASTE (2014).