OUR CONTRIBUTORS
Issue 8, Volume II
Issue 8, Volume II
Eduardo Hughes Galeano was a Uruguayan journalist, writer, and novelist, Galeano's most famous work is Las venas abiertas de America Latina, 1971 (Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent) and about the Memoria del fuego (Memor y of Fire Trilogy, 1982–6), both of which have been reprinted several times. In particular he strove to address the chronic amnesia which he felt was endemic to the Americas, as a result of its complicated history.
In 1973, when the right wing military seized control of Uruguay, Galeano was imprisoned and later fled to Argentina. Vena abiertas was subsequently banned by the right wing dictatorships of not only Uruguay, but also Argentina. After a military coup in his name was added to the list of those condemned by the death squads; and he went into exile in Spain. There he wrote Memoris del Fuego. Our editor met him after his return to his native Uruguay. Sadly, Galeano died of lung cancer on April 13, 2015. He was 74.
Pocket Anthology:
Mark David Wyers, whose flash-fiction piece "The Click" appeared in The Wall Issue 6, completed his BA in literature at the University of Tampa and his MA in Turkish studies at the University of Arizona. From 2008 to 2013 he was the director of the Academic Writing Center at Kadir Has University in Istanbul, during which time he drew upon his master’s thesis to write a historical book-length study titled “Wicked Istanbul”: The Regulation of Prostitution in the Early Turkish Republic. He has since dedicated himself to working on translations of Turkish novels, published examples of which include Boundless Solitude by Selim İleri, The King of Taksim Square by Emrah Serbes, The Pasha of Cuisine by Saygın Ersin, and The Peace Machine by Özgür Mumcu, and in 2019 his translations of The Girl in the Tree by Şebnem İşigüzel and Stepmother Earth by Yakup Kadri Karaosmanoğlu will be released. His translations of Turkish short stories have been published in a number of anthologies and journals.
Seray Şahiner, born in Bursa in 1984, grew up in Istanbul, where she studied journalism until 2007. Whilst a student she worked for the culture magazine Hayvan and was a member of the editorial staff of the literary magazine Aylak. She also co-published the fanzines Kaygan Zemin and Kara Kutu. She has worked as a correspondent for Marie Claire and the newspaper Birgün and has also written television screenplays. Her short stories attracted much attention during the Yaşar Nabi Nayır Short Story Competition organized by Varlık literary magazine. Her latest novel Kul has received the Orhan Kemal Novel Prize in 2018. Her previous works include Bridal Hair (Gelin Başı), 2007, novella; To The Attention of Women (Hanımların Dikkatine), 2011, short stories; Antabus, 2014, novella, and Kul, 2017, novel.
Ayşegül Yazmacı graduated from Marmara University, Fine Arts Faculty, Department of Cinema & TV in 2009. Her thesis project, a short film named Three (Üç) was screened in !F Istanbul Independent Film Festival and the İTÜ Short Film Festival. She was awarded the Jury’s Special Award in the Siirt Bar Short Film Festival. She acted in the musical We Started from Scratch (Biz Sıfırdan Başladık) written and directed by Gülriz Sururi, and acted in several plays, TV series and commercials. Her works indifferent fields include screenwriting, photography and video directing and editing. Her short story “Yasemin” was selected in the Discover series arranged by the British Council and ITEF Istanbul International Literature Festival. She is currently working on a short story collection.
Afşin Kum studied computer engineering at Bosporus University and then Cinema & Television at Bilgi University, and has worked as a writer and project director for various organizations since 1997 while also working on scores and screenwriting. In 2010, he co-founded the Afili Filintalar website. He has had stories and essays published in Burada ve Ot magazine; his first novel, Hot Skull / Sıcak Kafa was published in 2016 in Turkey, winning the GIO Award, one of Turkish literature’s most prestigious prizes, and the novel is currently being adapted for the screen.
Yekta Kopan majored in Business at Hacettepe University. His book Recipes Of Loneliness From The Kitchen of Love (2002) received the 2002 Sait Faik Short Story Award and Carbon Copy won the 2007 Dünya Kitap Book of the Year Award. His collection, The Loss of You, has been awarded the 2010 Yunus Nadi Short Story Award and the 2010 Haldun Taner Short Story Award. He has also written the plays The Nose, The Nose on Vacation, Song of the Neighborhood, Long Huge Plenty. He edited Silk Handkerchief, a dictionary study on the history of the Turkish short story. His books and short stories have been translated into several languages including English, German, Italian, Japanese, Persian and Arabic. His works include Ivory Black (Fildişi Karası), 2000, stories; An Evaluation of Conscience in 7 Lessons (Yedi Derste Vicdan Muhasebesi), 2003, stories; Who Is Inside Of Me? (İçimde Kim Var?), 2004, novel; The Black Cat’s Shadow (Kara Kedinin Gölgesi), 2005, stories; A Family’s Tea Garden (Aile Çay Bahçesi), 2013, novel; Between Two Poems (İki Şiirin Arasında), 2014, stories; An Ordinary Day (Sıradan Bir Gün), 2018, novel.
Şebnem İşigüzel studied anthropology. Her first book, The Future Looks Bright, was published in 1993 and awarded the Yunus Nadi Short Story Prize. Her works include: Will Tell My Story, 1994, stories; My Old Buddy Lizard, 1996, novel; Ivy, 2002, novel; The Garbage Dump, 2004, novel; Parade, 2008, novel; In The Shadow of My Eyelashes, 2010, novel; Venus, 2013, novel; Mansion of Tears, 2016, novel; The Girl in the Tree, 2017, novel; and Goodness, 2019, novel. She lives in İstanbul where she makes her living as a writer.
Merete Çakmak is a translator across multiple languages, including English, Turkish, and Danish. Previously, she translated Amasya: Maid of the Mountains into English, as well as The Rose: Flower of love, flower of art, flower of eternity, Pergamon, and the illustrated children's book, Jasmine's Dream, all of which were originally released in Turkish by the prestigious Yapı Kredi publishing house. She lives in Istanbul.
Memoir:
Chris Sawyer-Lauçanno, whose memoir we continue to serialize, is the author of more than a dozen books including biographies of Paul Bowles and E.E.Cummings, and a group portrait of American writers in Paris 1944-1960, The Continual Pilgrimage. He is also well-known as a translator and poet. His translations include books by Paul Eluard, Rafael Alberti, Panaït Istrati, García Lorca and the Mayan Books of Chilam Balam. His most recent publications are Dix méditations sur quelques mots d’Antonin Artaud, translated by Patricia Pruitt (Paris: Alyscamps, 2018) Remission (Talisman House, 2016) and Mussoorie-Montague Miscellany (Talisman House, 2014) Until his retirement he taught writing at MIT for over a quarter-century. He lives in Turners Falls, Massachusetts. Many of his books are available on Amazon.
Portfolio:
Tim Milk (b. Chicago, 1954) is a representational artist known for hallucinatory views of people and places.Early on, he set out to devise his own art education. Through his own choice of teachers he studied the figure, and he also undertook a first-hand study of the masters, making several travels abroad. His work in acrylics surprises with their illusion of depth and space. The latest series, the so-called Ghosts, are spirit portraits remembered from youth.
Essays:
François Jullien is an internationally recognized philosopher and sinologist who explores the workings of European and Chinese thought. He holds several academic posts in France including professor of Chinese philosophy and Literature at the University of Paris VII. He has published more than thirty books among them The Propensity of Things: Toward a History of Efficacy in China, and The Strange Idea of the Beautiful.
Jody Gladding, translator, has published three collections of poems – most recently, Translation from Bark Beetle – and over thirty translations from the French. She has received the French-American Translation Award, and the Yale Younger Poets Prize.
¡Viva!
Brian Cullman is a writer & musician living in New York City. He is a regular contributor to The Paris Review and records for Sunnyside Records. www.briancullman.com
Editors:
Bronwyn Mills holds an MFA from UMass, Amherst, and a Ph.D. from NYU where she was an Anais Nin
Fellow. Later a Fulbright Fellow (La République du Bénin, West Africa) she travels widely, and has lived in New York City, Istanbul, Turkey; Latin America; and Paris, France. For many years a dance and theatre writer for regional arts publications in New England, she is also a Senior prose editor for Tupelo Quarterly. Books include Night of the Luna Moths (poetry,) Beastly's Tale (a fabulist novel); and she is currently working on Canary Club, a novel set in medieval Spain. Her work has appeared in IKON, Frigate,Talisman: a Journal of Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, Tupelo Quarterly, and most recently in Agni Online.She guest-edited the Turkish issue of Absinthe; New European Writing (#19.) Bronwyn has taught at Stevens Institute of Technology; Kadir Has University in Istanbul; and Abomey-Calavi in Bénin. From time to time she publishes work on African vodou. Bronwyn lives and writes in a tiny mountain village far, far away. Read more at https://bronwynmills.org/
Eric Darton has published a number of books, including the New York Times bestseller Divided We Stand: A
Biography of The World Trade Center (Basic Books, 1999, 2011), and Free City, a novel, (WW Norton, 1996). He is also the author of an ongoing work of free scholarship, Book of the World Courant, available at www.bookoftheworldcourant.net. Recently his essays have been published in Tupelo Quarterly www.tupeloquarterly.com. More of his work may be found at www.ericdarton.net and here at The Wall. Darton leads Writing at the Crossroads, a workshop for prose writers, a sampling of whose work appears in issue 2.
Hardy Griffin has a Ph.D. from Boğaziçi University. He has published translations in the Istanbul Biennial,
Words Without Borders, and for the award-winning photographic study Armenians, which documents the lives of Armenians living in contemporary Turkey. He has published writing in New Flash Fiction, Alimentum, Assisi, The Washington Post, American Letters & Commentary, and a chapter in Writing Fiction (Bloomsbury, 2003).
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