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There’s no doubt that Mhyana knows how to weave imagery and make love to words and sensation in a way that leaves you breathless.” 
                                                                            Carve Magazine 

      “Exquisite”                            “Awfully good”                              “Very impressed”

Southeast Review              –Mid-American Review               –Hayden’s Ferry Review

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      “Impressive”                      “Such lovely writing”                           “Wonderful”  

  – Columbia Journal                       - Ruminate                     – The North American Review

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      “Subtle, evocative”                                    “A very strong manuscript”

    — Antigonish Review                                      — Beloit Poetry Review

 

 

“Sensitivity in the choice of detail and evocation of feeling”
                                             —Event Magazine

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“Fabulous, original, impassioned” 

—Entelechy Mind and Culture

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   “I loved so much about ‘Cloud Atlases, Panic Pills,

& a Ribbon of Blue’ (anything that starts with a quote by 

Jean Rhys immediately has my attention).”

                                                                                           – The Kenyon Review

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         Recent Publications

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The Annie Dillard Award for Creative Nonfiction

Finalist, Bellingham Review / finalist / “A Vow of Silence” / Lyric essay (June 2022)

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The Maine Review,  “Different Yellows, Whole and Broken” / Lyric essay (May 2022)

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Chautauqua, “May you Carry the Broken World” / Lyric essay (May 2022)

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The Southeast Review, “Prospecting” / Lyric essay (March 2019)

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The Compassion Anthology: Mercy for the Displaced /  “Counting the Beats” / Lyric essay (winter/spring 2019)

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Lunch Ticket, “Counting the Beats” / Lyric essay (winter/spring 2019)

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Sigh Press, “Poetry in a Hostile Environment” / Cultural Commentary (winter 2018)

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Sigh Press, “The Cry Catcher” / Poem on the theme of fragility (winter 2018)

 

The Cincinnati Review, “Sacre Coeur & Wound Man” / Lyric essay (Issue 15:1, 2017)

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Cutbank, “Laughter & Forgetting” / Lyric essay (Issue 87, 2018)

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The Roanoke Review, “Mappa Mundi” and “The Weight of Prayer” (Vol XLII) / Poems

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Structo, “RX” / Poem (Issue 18, Spring 2018)

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Juked, “Milk & Honey: Portrait of a Self-Portraitist” and “Forever’s Requiem” / Lyric essay & flash prose

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Burrow Press Review, “Grindstone & Fog” and “Knaves & Whoresons” / Prose poem & Lyric essay (nominated Best of the Net 2015, 2016)

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Eclectica, “Ambidextrous Poesie” (finalist, Best of Issue)/ Lyric essay

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About Jalina

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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. 

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