Contributors

Somrita Urni Ganguly [Guest-Editor] is a professor, poet, and award-winning literary translator. She was affiliated with Brown University, Rhode Island, as a Fulbright Doctoral Research Fellow. She is the editor of Quesadilla and Other Adventures: Food Poems (Hawakal Publishers, 2019), and has translated Dinesh Chandra Chattopadhyay’s Firesongs (BEE Books, 2019), Ashutosh Nadkar’s Shakuni: Master of the Game (Juggernaut Books, 2019), and Shankarlal Sengupta’s The Midnight Sun: Love Lyrics and Farewell Songs (2018). Somrita was selected by the National Centre for Writing, UK, as an emerging translator in 2016. She was invited as translator-in-residence at Cove Park, Scotland, in October 2017, and in December 2017 she was invited as poet-in-residence at Arcs of a Circle, Mumbai, an artistes’ residency organized by the US Consulate in Bombay. Somrita’s work has been showcased at the 2017 London Book Fair and has been published in Words Without Borders, In Other Words, and Trinity College Dublin’s Journal of Literary Translation, among others. Somrita has taught British literature to undergraduate and graduate students in Delhi and Calcutta, and has presented research papers at various national and international conferences in India, Singapore, UK, and USA. She has fourteen academic publications to her credit and is a recipient of the Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Fund Award (2013) and the Sarojini Dutta Memorial Prize (2011).

Cristina Peri Rossi is a Uruguayan novelist, poet, and translator. Born in Montevideo, she has lived in Barcelona since the 1970s when she went into political exile. Peri Rossi has published nineteen books of poetry, earning her many literary prizes in the genre including the Rafael Alberti International Poetry Prize, the City of Torrevieja International Poetry Prize, and the Loewe Foundation International Poetry Prize.

Elizabeth Rose is in love with the impossibility of recreating meaning and sound across languages. She translates from Spanish and German into English and researches the intersections of translation, exile, and queer perspectives in literature. She received her MA from the University of Illinois in Translation Studies. Her work has appeared in Alchemy, Tupelo Quarterly and Raspa Magazine.

A recipient of the Kavi Salam Award 2018, Sufia Khatoon is an author, a performance poet and artist based in Kolkata, India. Her poems and short stories have been published in various national and international anthologies of repute. She is a multi-lingual poet and Death In The Holy Month is her debut book of poems. She is the co-founder of the Rhythm Divine Poets community in Kolkata. Her Bengali poem ‘Ami Bolli Tumi Sunno’ got featured in the Tollywood movie Antor Shotta. She has performed and participated as a delegate and poet at the Yuva Sahiti Young Writers Meet in the Festival of Letters of Sahitya Akademi 2019, Avishkar Young Writer’s Festival Dibrugrh 2019 by Sahitya Academy, Apeejay Kolkata Literary Festival 2019 and Ethos Literary Festival Kolkata 2018. She has judged the IIT Kharagpur Spring Fest Slam poetry 2018 Kolkata Prelims round among many other competitions. She has also received the Amio Santa Award 2017 for her social efforts.

Appu Jacob John is Assistant Professor at St. Albert’s College, Ernakulam, Kerala.

Manjari Chowdhury studied mass communication. She is a food blogger, a home chef, and presently a freelancer working on qualitative market research. She is a dreamer who loves furry creatures, especially meows, and she is trying to adopt a zero-waste lifestyle by avoiding plastic. She makes time for gardening, loves reading, and has a keen interest in knowing about the history of food from different cultures. She believes that food can bring people together and conversations can start over a slice of cake. What Manjari cooks depends on whom she is cooking for, but on any given day Manjari loves baking gateau, cheesecakes and biscuits. Manjari’s recipes can be found at http://fromthekitchenstothetastebuds.blogspot.in/

Kathleen Rose Kahn was born on 20 January, 1956. Raised in East Longmeadow, Western Massachusetts, Kathy studied organic chemistry at Southern Massachusetts University (now UMass Dartmouth). She also followed the Grateful Dead band on multiple tours during her early years, and lived in San Francisco for a time after college. After returning and working as a licensed massage therapist and alternative medicine practitioner on the South Coast of Massachusetts, she married Daniel Kahn in 1987. Kathy has helped to manage many gardens in the Providence, RI area after she moved with her family to Seekonk, Massachusetts in 1994. She has also volunteered at Greenlock Therapeutic Riding Center in Rehoboth, Massachusetts, which also connects to Kathy’s lifelong love of working with horses. Kathy has a keen eye for recipes and can easily process the endless bounty which her green thumb reliably produces from farm gardens. She continues to practice alternative medicine in the Providence area.

Justin Eli Kahn was born in December of 1988 in Providence, Rhode Island, during a prolonged nurses’ strike, and as the song “I’m My Own Grandpa” played on the radio. Justin somehow graduated from the prestigious Milton Academy, but couldn’t manage his affairs at Hampshire College for long enough. He mainly blames the spooks and the late great comedian Bill Hicks for that. A lifelong student of music, Justin is now a failed musician and songwriter, a fate he attempts to exploit in a busking act (and moderately successful SoundCloud page) known as “maasss”. Justin has lived in the Providence area for most of his adult life. Since 1October, 2019, he has been living in Kolkata, India.

Rahee Punyashloka is a Dalit scholar who is currently a doctoral research fellow at the Centre for English Studies, School of Language, Literature, and Cultural Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. His undergoing PhD thesis is titled Anti-Novel: A Study. His research interests also include contemporary philosophy, image studies, and the works of Sigmund Freud, Jacques Derrida, and Jotirao Phule. He is also a filmmaker and video artist who processes analog techniques in digital. Some of his works have been screened at New Delhi, Athens, Jakarta, Rotterdam, and New York.

Diksha Narang completed her Masters in Philosophy (MPhil) in Sociology from the South Asian University where she is currently enrolled as a PhD candidate. Her research interests revolve around processes of market creation, development interventions and human-animal relations. For her PhD, she is proposing a study of the interface between changing dairy markets and practices of animal husbandry in rural Rajasthan. She can be reached at diksha.narang12@gmail.com

Anil Pradhan is pursuing a PhD at the Department of English, Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India. He received his MPhil and MA in English from Jadavpur University and his BA in English from Presidency University, Kolkata. His areas of interest include cultural studies; queer studies, literature and films; diaspora studies and literature (with focus on South Asian queer diaspora) and Indian queer literature in English. His research articles have been published in Jadavpur University Essays and Studies, Lapis Lazuli, and Impressions. He has presented several papers on LGBTQ+ issues and themes at conferences in India, Singapore, the U.K. and the U.S.A.

Gaurav Kumar is a UGC Junior Research Fellow in English Literature, pursuing an MPhil at the Department of Comparative Literature and Translation Studies, Ambedkar University, Delhi. His MPhil dissertation examines the philosophy of desire, laughter and translation in minor literatures of India. He can be reached at gauravk.18@stu.aud.ac.in and at write2gaurav.kumar@yahoo.com

Nimisha Sinha is a research scholar in the Department of English at the University of Hyderabad. She is currently working on the ethics of consumption and the eating body as dramatised in select twentieth and twenty-first and century fiction.

Taiyaba Ali is a student of English Literature with an unending interest in everything food. Her work experience includes skills facilitation for the underprivileged youth in Delhi. When free, Taiyaba spends time reading and documenting about food and culture. She aims to build scholarship connecting narratives around traditional cooking and its impact on history and culture. Born and brought up in Lucknow, India, Taiyaba owes her fascination for Urdu literature and culture to her hometown but also feels passionately about Delhi where she spent time studying for some years.

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