Güneli Gün (Güneli T. Hershiser) is a Turkish writer who publishes in English. She lives in Oberlin, Ohio, where she has been teaching creative writing and women’s studies at Oberlin College for many years. She is the author of Book of Trances: A Novel of Magic Recitals (1979) and a picaresque novel entitled On the Road to Baghdad: A Picaresque Novel of Magical Adventures, Begged, Borrowed, and Stolen from the Thousand and One Nights (1991; rpt. 1994). John Barth has said that she is “a shrewd and magical Turkish-American storyteller, sired by Garcia Marquez.“ Gün is a regular contributor to the Paris Review and the World Literature Today. She is the translator of three major Turkish novels into English, among them Orhan Pamuk’s The Black Book (1994) and The New Life (1997).
Martina Kohl studied at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz and Florida Southern College in Lakeland, Florida. She received an M.A. (1985) and a Dr. Phil. (1992) from Mainz University. Her research interest concentrated on 19th and 20th century American literature. From 1985 to 1990, she taught in the English Department and for the English Composition Board and served as writing consultant at the Business School of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Since 1993, Martina Kohl has been working as Cultural Affairs Specialist for the U.S. Embassy in Bonn and Berlin where she coordinates a Germany-wide speaker as well as curriculum development program in American Studies. Dr. Kohl frequently teaches Cultural Diplomacy courses at Humboldt University Berlin. Her publications include “The Wilhelm Meister Pebble”: Bildungsromanelemente in Thomas Wolfes Look Homeward, Angel (1929), Of Time and the River (1935), The Web and the Rock (1939) und You Can’t Go Home Again (1940) (1994), and Visual Culture in the American Studies Classroom (2005), which she co-edited with Udo J. Hebel. Together with Hans-Jürgen Grabbe (Halle-Wittenberg) and Alfred Hornung (Mainz), Martina Kohl publishes the electronic American Studies Journal and edited the following issues: with Peter Freese, “Ethnic Visions of the United States of America,” no. 51 (2008); with Alfred Hornung, “Arab-American Literature and Culture,” no. 52 (2008); with Jörg Nagler, “Lincoln’s Legacy: Nation Building, Democracy and the Question of Civil Rights,” no. 53 (2009); “Urban Culture, Urban Landscapes: Growing Up in the American City ” no. 54 (2010); and “Women’s Voices from the House of Time” no. 55 (January 2011; revised and expanded edition December 2011). “Teaching Abraham Lincoln in the EFL Classroom: A German Case Study” in John Dean, ed., Abraham Lincoln in Europe: Political Uses, Popular Images, 1865–2012 is forthcoming with Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Arab American Literature and Culture, which she edited with Alfred Hornung in the American Studies—A Monograph Series (199) is forthcoming with Winter Verlag Heidelberg in 2012.
Lisa Suhair Majaj was born in Hawarden, Iowa, in 1960, raised in Amman, Jordan, and educated in Beirut, Lebanon until 1982 and at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. She lived in the U.S. for 19 years before moving to Nicosia, Cyprus in 2001. A poet, writer and critic, she has published poetry, creative non-fiction, academic articles and reviews in a wide range of journals and anthologies, and in two poetry chapbooks. She has also co-edited three collections of critical essays: Going Global: The Transnational Reception of Third World Women Writers; Intersections: Gender, Nation and Community in Arab Women’s Novels, and Etel Adnan: Critical Essays on the Arab-American Writer and Artist. Currently, she is co-editing an anthology of Arab-American literature that spans over a hundred years. Her writing has been translated into several languages. She has read her poetry across the U.S. and in Bahrain, Germany, Cyprus, Jerusalem, and Jordan. In 2008, Lisa Suhair Majaj was awareded the Annual Del Sol Poetry Press Award for Geographies of Light. (Adapted from http://delsolpress.org/dsp-poetryprizewinners.htm, accessed October 19, 2010).
Nahid Rachlin, born in Iran, came to the United States to attend college and stayed. Among her publications are a memoir, Persian Girls (2007), four novels, Foreigner (1999), Married To A Stranger (2001), The Heart’s Desire (2001), Jumping Over The Fire (2006) ), and a collection of short stories, Veils (2001). Her work has been published in Portuguese, Dutch, Italian, Farsi, Arabic. All her published books are currently in print in paperback editions and are available at chain stores as well as independent ones. They are also widely used in college courses. Her individual short stories have appeared in more than fifty magazines, including The Virginia Quarterly Review, Prairie Schooner, Redbook, Shenandoah, New Letters. They have been reprinted in several anthologies, including, Literature: The Human Experience (St. Martin’s Press). Her essays have been published in Natural History Magazine, The New York Times Magazine, Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series and in an anthology, How I Learned to Cook and Other Writings on Complex Mother-Daughter Relationships (2004). She has written reviews for the New York Times and Newsday. While a student she held a Doubleday-Columbia fellowship and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship (Stanford). The grants and awards she has received include, the Bennet Cerf Award, PEN Syndicated Fiction Project Award, and a National Endowment for the Arts grant. Currently she teaches at the New School University and the Unterberg Poetry Center at the 92nd Street Y. She has taught at Yale University and Barnard College. She is an associate fellow at Yale.
http://www.nahidrachlin.com
Moira Roth was born in London in 1933, of immigrant parents and brought up in England until she settled in the United States in 1957. She studied at the University of Vienna, the London School of Economics, and New York University. She received her PhD in Art History from the University of California, Berkeley (1974). Moira Roth focuses on modern art history and has taught for many years at various campuses, including the University of California, San Diego. Since 1986, she has been based in Northern California, living in Berkeley and teaching in nearby Oakland at Mills College, where she holds the Eugene E. Trefethen, Jr. Chair of Art History. She has published extensively on contemporary art in the U.S. and abroad, and on U.S. performance art, editing two books on the subject—The Amazing Decade: Women and Performance Art in America, 1970–1980 (1983) and Rachel Rosenthal (1997). In 1998, her first volume of collected writings was published: Difference/Indifference: Musings on Postmodernism, Marcel Duchamp and John Cage (1998, with Jonathan D. Katz). She is currently working on her second volume, Traveling Companions/Fractured Worlds. In 1994, she and Yolanda Lopez contributed an essay entitled “Social Protest: Racism and Sexism” to Norma Broude’s and Mary D. Garrard’s The Power of Feminist Art. Moira Roth edited Faith Ringgold’s autobiography We Flew over the Bridge (1995) and wrote the afterword for Phoebe Farris’s Women Artists of Color: A Bio-Critical Sourcebook to 20th Century Artists in the Americas (1998).
Pireeni Sundaralingam was born in Sri Lanka, educated in England, is married to an Irish composer and musician, and currently lives in San Francisco. Her poetry moves between all these cultures, but also between cognitive science, her field of studies, and the arts. A former PEN U.S.A. Rosenthal Fellow, her poems have appeared in both American and European journals, including Ploughshares, The Progressive, World Literature Today, and The Guardian newspaper, and featured in anthologies such as Amnesty’s 100 Poems for Human Rights (2009), university textbooks such as Three Genres (2009) and Language for a New Century: Poetry from the Middle East, Asia and Beyond (2008). Educated at the University of Oxford, she has held scientific research posts at MIT, UCLA and Oxford. In the summer of 2011, she held a fellowship in Interdisciplinary Thought at the Hochschule der Künste in Berlin. Pireeni Sundaralingham co-edited the anthology Indivisible: The First National Anthology of South Asian American Poets (University of Arkansas Press, 2010) which received the 2011 PEN Oakland-Josephine Miles Literary Award. Her work has been published in England, Ireland, Sweden, and the United States and translated into several languages such as Gaelic, Swedish, Vietnamese and Tamil.
Mindy Weisel was born in Bergen-Belsen Displaced Persons Camp, near the former concentration camp Bergen-Belsen, Germany, as the only daughter of Holocaust survivors, and moved to the U.S. with her parents at age of three. She began painting at the age of fourteen in order to find her own voice, putting her feelings and experiences, both past and present, into her work. Among her several solo exhibitions are AFTER: The Survival of Beauty at Jean Albano Gallery, Chicago (2010), Full Circle at Lorch+Seidel Galerie, Berlin (2009; co-sponsored by the U.S. Embassy, Berlin), Of Roses and Rasa at Prada Gallery, Washington, DC, (2008) and Words on a Journey at the Katzen Art Center, American University, Washington, DC (2006). In addition to her art, Mindy Weisel is the author of Touching Quiet: Reflections in Solitude (2002) and the editor of Daughters of Absence: Transforming a Legacy of Loss (2001). She is currently working on a memoir.
http://www.mindyweisel.com
