Mary Anne Mohanraj

Mary Anne Amirthi Mohanraj
Born (1971-07-26) July 26, 1971
Colombo, Sri Lanka
Nationality American
Occupation Writer, editor, academic

Mary Anne Amirthi Mohanraj (born July 26, 1971) is an American writer, editor, and academic of Sri Lankan birth.

Background

Mohanraj was born in Colombo, Sri Lanka but moved to the United States at the age of two and grew up in New Britain, Connecticut.[1]

Her parents, who had originally intended to return to Sri Lanka after a few years and were still considering the possibility for the future, planned in 1983 to send 12-year-old Mary Anne to live with her grandparents for a summer "to reconnect" with her homeland. Just before she was to go, her father received a telegram. "Don't send her. There's trouble coming." He cancelled the trip. As she later wrote,

It's called Black July in Sri Lanka. Riots erupted in Colombo, the capital city, killing thousands of Tamils, the ethnic minority group, the group to which I belong. Brutal chaos ensued – friends of mine who were there tell horrifying stories. They saw tires put around men's necks, saw them lit on fire. They saw women and children dragged from their homes, pulled from cars to be raped and killed in the street.

I saw none of this, but the stories haunt my fiction. Whether I'm writing mainstream lit or fantasy or science fiction, I keep coming back to the war in Sri Lanka. I keep thinking about the life I would have had, if my parents had made different choices. If we had stayed there, and been killed in the riots. If I had gotten on that plane. If we had fled, as so many of my aunts and uncles did, and ended up as refugees in Canada or elsewhere.[2]

Instead, Mohanraj attended Miss Porter's School and the University of Chicago and graduated with a degree in English Literature in 1993. She holds an MFA from Mills College (1998) and a PhD in English Literature from the University of Utah (2005). She also attended the Clarion West Writing Workshop in 1997.

Academic career

Mohanraj has taught at Salt Lake Community College, the University of Utah, and Vermont College. From September 2005 to June 2007, she was a Visiting Professor in the MFA Program at Roosevelt University. From 2007 to 2008, she was a Visiting Professor at Northwestern University, in the Center for the Writing Arts. She taught at the Clarion Workshop in July 2008.[3][4] Since 2008, she has worked as a Clinical Assistant Professor in the English Department at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). She was Associate Coordinator of Asian and Asian American Studies at UIC from 2009 to 2014.[5][6]

Writing

Her novel-in-stories, Bodies in Motion, received an honorable mention from the 2007 Asian American Literary Awards and was named a USA Today notable book.[7] In 2006, Mohanraj received an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship in Prose. She was the co-founder and editor-in-chief for Clean Sheets, an online magazine of erotica, from 1998 to 2000. In 2000 she helped found Strange Horizons, where she was the editor-in-chief through 2003.[8] In 2004 she founded the Speculative Literature Foundation,[9] which she still directs, and is a founding member and Executive Director of Desilit,[10] an organization designed to support South Asian and diaspora writers. Mohanraj founded and is Executive Director of the biennial Kriti Festival,[11] a celebration of South Asian and diaspora literature and arts, founded in 2005. As of 2013, she is Editor-in-Chief of Jaggery, "A DesiLit Arts and Literature Journal".[12]

Mohanraj's writing frequently explores issues of cultural identity. She has noted in interviews that she feels the complexity of such issues in her own life: "When people ask me what my identity is, I could say I'm Sri Lankan-American ... I could say I was raised Catholic but now I'm agnostic. I could say I've been called a queer, because although I've been with a man the past 17 years, I'm bisexual."[13] She is also something of a sexuality activist; she founded and moderates the Internet Erotica Writers' Workshop, and was a former moderator for soc.sexuality.general.[14]

Personal life

Mohanraj lives in Oak Park, Illinois, a Chicago suburb, with her husband, Kevin Whyte (a mathematician), and their children, daughter Kaviarasi Whyte (born May 18, 2007), and son Anandan Whyte (born September 24, 2009).[15]

On February 12, 2015, she announced in her blog that she had been diagnosed with breast cancer.[16] She has been documenting the treatment (including chemotherapy and a lumpectomy) in a "Cancer Log" on her website.[17] On February 24, 2015, she married Whyte, with whom she had had a domestic partnership for 23 years.[18]

Bibliography

Novels

Collections

Nonfiction

Children's

Edited Books

Edited Online Magazines/Journals

References

  1. ↑ "Mary Anne Mohanraj: Breaking Down Barriers". Locus Magazine. October 2006. Retrieved 2013-05-06.
  2. ↑ "The Big Idea: Mary Anne Mohanraj" November 21, 2013 Whatever: The Big Idea John Scalzi
  3. ↑ "2008 Clarion Instructors". Archived from the original on 2008-01-17.
  4. ↑ "AISFP 56 - Mary Anne Mohanraj". Adventures in Sci-Fi Publishing.
  5. ↑ "UIC Faculty and Staff - Mary Anne Mohanraj". Archived from the original on 2015-04-26.
  6. ↑ "Top 10 Quotes From the Kriti Festival 2014 – A Celebration of South Asian Literature and Arts".
  7. ↑ "Upcoming titles". USA Today. May 25, 2005.
  8. 1 2 Mohanraj, Mary Anne (22 September 2003). "Changing of the Guard". Strange Horizons. Retrieved 9 September 2015.
  9. ↑ "The Speculative Literature Foundation". Retrieved 18 January 2010.
  10. ↑ "DesiLit: Staff". Retrieved 18 January 2010.
  11. ↑ "Kriti (creation)". Retrieved 18 January 2010.
  12. 1 2 "Masthead". Jaggery. Retrieved 9 September 2015.
  13. ↑ Allen, Jessica (19 November 2008). "Author tackles sexuality, identity". The Daily Northwestern. Retrieved 4 January 2009.
  14. ↑ Roy, Sandip (11 August 2005). "ASIAN POP Sexing Sri Lanka / How a Tamil immigrant girl grew up to become an erotica queen and new voice in South Asian literature (page 2 of 5)". SF Gate. Retrieved 18 January 2010.
  15. ↑ Mohanraj, Mary Anne. "Biography". Retrieved 9 April 2016.
  16. ↑ Mohanraj, Mary Anne. "Diagnosis The first ...". An Ongoing, Erratic Diary. Retrieved 9 April 2016.
  17. ↑ Mohanraj, Mary Anne. "Category Archives: Cancer Log". An Ongoing, Erratic Diary. Retrieved 9 April 2016.
  18. ↑ Mohanraj, Mary Anne. "Kevin and I got married ...". An Ongoing, Erratic Diary. Retrieved 9 April 2016.
  19. ↑ "Staff Bios". Clean Sheets. 4 August 2002. Archived from the original on August 4, 2002. Retrieved 9 September 2015.
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