BIOS - M to R



 
Ian MacFadyen Ian MacFadyen co-authored the book 'William S. Burroughs ; CUT' with Professor Axel Heil (ZKM, 2013), and co-edited 'Naked Lunch @ 50: Anniversary Essays' with Professor Oliver Harris (Southern Illinois University, 2009). His essay, 'Machine Dreams: Optical Toys And Mechanical Boys' was published in the collection 'Flickers Of The Dreamachine' (1969). His writings on Yoko Ono, Georges Perec, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Antonionio, Pasolini, Kathy Acker, David Foster Wallace, Deborah Levy, and others, have appeared in many journals. Ian MacFadyen was trained and taught as an art historian (with Sir Lawrence Gowing and T.J. Clark) and he also worked as an ethnologist (Islamic mathematics, culture, history and religion), but gave up an academic career so that he could write exactly what he wanted to write when he wanted to write. His work on William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin is archived online at RealityStudio: A William S. Burroughs Community. He also exhibits his large scale ink drawings. He lives in London.  
 
Bouvard Pécuchet Bouvard Pécuchet is a pseudonym of Richard Denner. He is the adventurer, the reconnoiter. Born to a Jewish family in Szczucin, Poland, he immigrated as a child with his family to Brive-la-Gaillarde, France, during WWII. He had a thirty year career as an international journalist before retiring to the United States to write travel fiction and interview notable figures in the arts and sciences. Presently, he resides in Aptos, California, with his cat, Marlow.  
 
Pavle Radonic Pavle Radonic An Australian writer of Montenegrin heritage, Pavle Radonic landed on the equator in South-east Asia by accident four years ago, where-stranger than fiction-he finds himself fast becoming an interpreter of Islam. Pavle's work has appeared in a range of Australian and Australasian literary journals. Most recently Ambit Magazine, UK published another sequence from Singapore this northern summer.  
 
ANITA NAIR Anita Nair is the internationally acclaimed author of the novels The Better Man, Ladies Coupe, Mistress, Lessons in Forgetting and Cut Like Wound. She has also published a collection of poems titled Malabar Mind and a collection of essays titled Goodnight & God Bless, and has written two plays and the screenplay for the movie adaptation of her novel Lessons in Forgetting which won the National Film Award for 2012. She was awarded the Central Sahitya Akademi award for her contribution to Children's Literature in 2013. Her books have been translated into 30 languages. Her new novel Idris : Keeper of the Light was short-listed for The Hindu Literary Prize.
She runs a Creative Writing Mentorship program in Bangalore called Anita's Attic. Visit her at www.anitanair.net and www.anitasattic.com or follow her on twitter @anitanairauthor
 
 
ANNA SUJATHA MATHAI Anna Sujatha Mathai studied English Literature at the University of Delhi, and later at Bangalore. She completed a Post-Graduate degree in Social Studies from the University of Edinburgh, and worked in the U.K. in this field. Her passion was the Theatre, but cut off by circumstances, and in an isolated situation, she started writing poetry - and throwing it away! However, an ad in a paper by an American professor asking for "poems from avant-garde writers" led to her sending him a few. His reply that he was "moved" encouraged her to continue writing. She has five collections of poetry in English. She has read at venues across the world, and many of her poems have been translated into Indian and European languages. The poems represented here were first published in The Attic of the Night (Rupa. 1991), and On My Side of the Street, in the Sahitya Akademi's 50th Anniversary Special Issue.  
 
SHIKHA MALAVIYA Shikha Malaviya (www.shikhamalaviya.com) is an Indo-American poet and writer. Her book, Geography of Tongues, was launched in December 2013 and featured in The Times of India Literary Carnival, Prakriti, and other festivals. Shikha is co-founder of The (Great) Indian Poetry Collective, a literary press dedicated to new poetic voices from India. Her poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and published in journals such as Prairie Schooner and Drunken Boat. Shikha is deeply involved in the poetry community through events/initiatives such as organizing '100 Thousand Poets for Change-Bangalore', in 2012 and 2013; co-founding 'Poetry in Public India,' a movement to bring powerful verse by Indian women to public places; giving a TEDx talk on 'Poetry in Daily Life' in Bangalore, 2013. Shikha graduated from the University of Minnesota with degrees in liberal studies, creative writing and mass communications. She currently lives in the San Francisco bay area.  
 
ANJALI PUROHIT Anjali Purohit is an artist and a writer. Her fiction and poetry has featured in anthologies and journals including Four Quarters Magazine, Desilit, Chowk, Indian Writing from Around the World, Urban Voice India and Suvarnarekha. Her story, Bitter Harvest, was a winner in the Commonwealth Short Story Competition 2008-09. Her book, Ragi-Ragini - Chronicles from Aji's Kitchen, was published by Yoda Press, Delhi in 2012. She organizes cultural interventions that bring together the different arts to hold a conversation on a single platform. Towards this effort she has been a part of the Guggenheim Lab, Mumbai (January 2013), curated Holding up Half the Sky for the 100 Thousand Poets for Change in Mumbai (September 2013), curated Mumbai Moulting: Erasures and a Palimpsest, at the Godrej India Culture Lab, December 2013 and organized the collaborative experiment Vasundhara: Dialects in Dialogue (January 2015). She is the founder of Cappuccino Readings, an initiative aimed at fostering a literary cafe culture in Mumbai.  
 
GJV PRASAD GJV Prasad discusses life and literature at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, where he is Professor of English and the Director of Jawaharlal Nehru Institute of Advanced Study. Prasad is also a novelist.  
 
JENNIFER ROBERTSON Jennifer Robertson is a poet and a CSR consultant living in Bombay. Her poetry has been featured in several Indian print anthologies and international e-zines. Her poems have appeared in Visual Verse, Moss Trill, RædLeaf Poetry India, Antiserious and elsewhere. Her book reviews have appeared and are forthcoming in The Telegraph, The Mint, Scroll and American Book Review. She was the reader and Judge for the RædLeaf Poetry India award in the year 2013 and 2014 respectively. She co-curates Cappuccino Readings in Bombay-an initiative to bring senior and emerging poets together in a cafe environment. Jennifer is a member of the PEN@Prithvi core team. Her first manuscript 'What I Write About When I Write About Bones' was chosen for the Editor's choice award by The (Great) Indian Poetry Collective.  
 
MANI RAO Mani Rao (b. 1965, India) is the author of eight poetry books and two books in translation-- of the Bhagavad Gita as a modern poem, and Kalidasa for the 21st Century Reader. Her poems and essays are in numerous journals and anthologies including W.W.Norton's Language for a New Century and the Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets. Mani worked for 20 years in advertising and television fields in India, Hong Kong and New Zealand. She has an MFA in Creative Writing, and is presently a PhD student at Duke University for a dissertation on mantras. See www.manirao.com
Photo credit - Tom Langdon
 
 
Rochelle Potkar Rochelle Potkar Potkar's short stories and poems have appeared in several Indian and international publications. Her first book of short stories, 'The Arithmetic of Breasts and Other Stories' was shortlisted for The Digital Book of the Year Award 2014, by Publishing Next. Her next book, 'Dreams of Déjà vu' is a speculative novel. She lives in the 'pandoramic' city of Mumbai with people real and imagined. She is at: www.rochellepotkar.com.  
 
UMA NARAYAN Uma Narayan is Professor of Philosophy and Andrew W. Mellon Chair of the Humanities at Vassar College, New York. She has been Chair of the Philosophy department and Director of the Women's Studies Program at Vassar. She is the author of Dislocating Cultures: Identities, Traditions and Third World Feminism, which won the Victoria Schuk award for the best book on women and politics in 1997. She has edited three anthologies - Recontructing Political Theory: Feminist Perspectives, Having and Raising Children and Deconstructing the Center: Feminist, Multicultural and Postcolonial Challenges to Philosophy. She has written poetry for years and is now starting make it a part of her public life.  
 
Will Nixon Will Nixon is the co-author of Walking Woodstock: Journeys into the Wild Heart of America's Most Famous Small Town and The Pocket Guide to Woodstock. His poetry collections include My Late Mother as a Ruffed Grouse and Love in the City of Grudges. His website is willnixon.com.  
 
Jerome Rothenberg Jerome Rothenberg is the author of over seventy books of poetry including Poland/1931 (1974), That Dada Strain (1983), New Selected Poems 1970-1985 (1986), Khurbn (1989), and most recently, The Case for Memory (2001) and A Book of Witness (2003). Describing his poetry career as "an ongoing attempt to reinterpret the poetic past from the point of view of the present," he has also edited seven major assemblages of traditional and contemporary poetry, including Technicians of the Sacred (1985), comprised of tribal and oral poetry from Africa, America, Asia, Europe, and Oceania, Revolution of the Word (1974), a collection of American experimental poetry between the two world wars and two volumes of Poems for the Millennium (1995, 1998), which won the Josephine Miles Award in 1996. In 1999 and again in 2001 he was a co-organizer of the People's Poetry Gathering, a three-day festival, under joint sponsorship by City Lore and Poet's House in New York City. Rothenberg was elected to the World Academy of Poetry (UNESCO) in 2001.  
 
Dan Raphael Dan Raphael is trying to expand his reach, with recent stays in the Oregon desert and Nanaimo. His next book, Everyone in this Movie Gets Paid, is seeking a publisher. Current poems appear in Caliban, Indefinite Space, 9th St. Laboratory, Make it True and Unlikely Stories.  
 
Lynne Potts Lynne Potts first book, PORTHOLE VIEW, won the National Poetry Review Press poetry prize in 2012. The press is publishing her second book MAME, SOL, AND DOG BARK, in 2015.
More than 120 of her poems have been published in such journals as: Paris Review, Southern Poetry Review, California Review, Meridian, American Letters and Commentary, Southern Poetry Review, Cincinnati Review, Southwest Review, Inkwell, Backwards City Review, Oxford Magazine, Nimrod, 14 Hills, 2River, The Journal, New Orleans Review, Southern Humanities Review, Dalhousie, Hot Metal Bridge, AGNI, Cumberland Review, and elsewhere. She won both the Backwards City Review prize for Poetry, and the Bowery Poetry Club HD Prize. Her work has received special recognition from Colorado Review, New Issues Press, Merrick Press, Alice James Press, and Ohio State Press.
 
 
Rich Murphy Rich Murphy credits include books Americana Prize Americana 2013 winner his third book by The Institute for American Studies and Popular Culture, an institute committed to creative writers as creators of culture and recorders of crucial ideas and important cultural moments. Voyeur 2008 Gival Press Poetry Award (Gival Press), and The Apple in the Monkey Tree 2007 (Codhill Press); chapbooks, Great Grandfather (Pudding House Press), Family Secret (Finishing Line Press), Hunting and Pecking (Ahadada Books), Rescue Lines (Right Hand Pointing), Phoems for Mobile Vices (BlazeVox) and Paideia (Aldrich Press). His critical essays have been published in The International Journal of the Humanities, Fringe, Journal of Ecocriticism, Reconfigurations: A Journal for Poetics Poetry / Literature and Culture, New Writing: The International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing, among others. Rich lives in Marblehead, MA.  
 
Simon Perchik Simon Perchik is an attorney whose poems have appeared in Partisan Review, The Nation, Osiris, Poetry, The New Yorker, and elsewhere. His most recent collection is Almost Rain, published by River Otter Press (2013). For more information, free e-books and his essay titled "Magic, Illusion and Other Realities" please visit his website at www.simonperchik.com.  
 
Stephen Nelson Stephen Nelson is a Scottish poet and musician whose books include Lunar Poems for New Religions (Knives, Forks and Spoons Press), Thorn Corners (erbacce-press), and YesYesY (Little Red Leaves Textile Series). Recent publications include the Baum Bim box of vispo from A Bad Penny Review, The Adirondack Review, BlazeVox Journal, Tip of the Knife, Otoliths, A-Minor Magazine and Utsanga. He featured in The Last Vispo Anthology (Fantagraphics) and in The Sunday Times Poet's Corner, and is currently exhibiting in a group show in Brazil. Check out his blog at www.afterlights.blogspot.com for publications, books, and a link to a Tumblr vispo blog. A new vispo collection called Arcturian Punctuation is forthcoming from Xexoxial Editions.