top of page
Check back soon
Once posts are published, you’ll see them here.

About Jalina

1D04DA8D-F912-4358-977D-A1E85B5A0FC0.jpeg

Jalina Mhyana, a 2022 finalist for the Annie Dillard Award for Creative Nonfiction, won the Dr. Sue Holman Travel Grant for her art history essay at the University of Oxford, which subsidized her research on superstition and talismans in Vienna.

 

Mhyana is the author of five volumes of essays and poems, one of which was a finalist in the Pudding House Publications contest. Her work appears in Five Points, The Southeast Review, The Cincinnati Review, Chautauqua, Lunch Ticket, ROOM, CutBank and others.

Her lyric essays have won Best of Issue, her work has been nominated for Pushcart Prizes, and her poetry was chosen to represent Shadow Day – a commemoration of Japanese survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

 

A graduate of the Bennington MFA Writing Seminars, Mhyana worked as founding editor of Rock Salt Plum Review and as a columnist for the Herald Union in Germany. She curated the Ekphrasis poetry reading series at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, England and moderated literary events and panels at St Marks’ Cultural Center in Florence, Italy.

Mhyana writes about everything invisible, from ancestral spirits to superstitions sewn into pillowcases with magical herbs to Asperger’s Syndrome –  a type of autism she lives with and sees as both a challenge and a gift. Asperger’s often expresses itself through a host of invisible illnesses such as panic disorder, which she explores in depth in her memoirs. She also writes extensively about gender fluidity and gender queerness, exile, liminality, and love. If not for love, the rest would be pointless.

She and artist Séan Leslie Quinn live in a wonderfully dilapidated 300 year-old home in France’s beautiful Loire Valley. Mhyana splits her time between France and New England and jokes that her third home is an airplane.

 

She is currently writing a memoir about her deportation from England in 2015, her four years as a renegade writer in Florence, Italy, and her solo pilgrimage across Europe that changed everything. 

bottom of page