The organization ultimately helped 28,000 people living in Brooklyn who were suffering from food crisis during the pandemic. She began organizing by creating a Slack network which she marketed through neighborhood flyers. She came up with the idea when talking with her neighbor, a native of Bedford-Stuyvesant while COVID-19 cases and quarantines were just beginning to spike in the US. Organizing ĭuring the COVID-19 pandemic, Mathews helped to create Bed-Stuy Strong, a grassroots mutual-aid organization that raised $1.2 million to serve its Brooklyn-based community. She completed the novel in 4 months, found an agent in November 2020, and sold it at auction. She wrote it at the same time that she was launching a mutual aid organization called Bed-Stuy Strong. Mathews began writing the novel in the summer 2020 when she was 29 years old and surviving on unemployment benefits during the COVID-19 pandemic. Elements of it reflect the author's own life as a queer South Asian immigrant to the US. The novel centers a South Asian queer protagonist who is navigating love, friendship, and career in Milwaukee during the Great Recession and the Obama presidency. Mathews did not receive the award, which has never been won by a South Asian author. The novel was received with critical acclaim and was a finalist in the 2022 National Book Awards. In 2022, she published her debut novel All This Could Be Different. She now calls it 'Novel Zero.' The next novel she worked on, All This Could Be Different, became her debut novel and was published in 2022. She worked on a novel for seven years-which she used for her MFA thesis-and ultimately put it aside. She also received The Best American Short Stories 2020 award.

In 2020, Mathews was a Margins Fellow at the Asian American Writers’ Workshop and a Rona Jaffe Fellow at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She currently lives in Brooklyn and considers Kerala to be her ancestral home. It was during this time that she wrote her debut novel and began a mutual-aid organization-at the same time. She lost work and income when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, causing her to go on unemployment and putting her process of becoming a naturalized US citizen at risk. After receiving her MFA, she worked many freelance jobs in New York City, including in graphic design, web design, project management, freelance writing, and as a personal assistant. She quit her job to pursue an MFA in writing. Mathews began her career in progressive politics at a public-affairs firm in Washington D.C. At Madison, she served as president of the Wisconsin Union Directorate.

She was a member of the class of 2017 at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She moved to Wisconsin with her family when she was 17. Her parents quickly moved with her to Muscat, Oman where she was raised in a tight-knit Indian enclave. Mathews was born in Bangalore, India to Malayali parents.

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