Dr. Christine Mangan has a PhD in English from University College Dublin, where her thesis focused on eighteenth-century Gothic literature, and an MFA in fiction writing from the University of Southern Maine. Tangerine is her first novel.
Maryam A. Wajdi: is a young Emirati poet, currently doing her Bachelors in Business Management and a minor in English Literature in the American University in Dubai. Her poems are scattered pieces of herself; stories stemmed from other stories. She is an admirer of all forms of art and aspires to make a difference in the lives of people around her through her works of literature.
Alia Adil Falaknaz: is an Emirati student majoring in Visual Communication – Graphic Design at The American University in Dubai. Alia has joined various competitions including Think Science, Montessori Model United Nations and INTEL ISEF, the world’s largest science fair. Her interests include baking, cooking, and fitness.
Mayar Ibrahim: is a 19-year-old Egyptian student studying journalism at the American University in Dubai, and she has been writing poetry and short stories since she was around 12 years old. Writing is how Mayar expresses herself and deals with her emotions. She is also an assistant editor for Indelible, as she is responsible for the poetry section, busy selecting contributions with words that come across the way they were intended.
Fadeke Lipede: is from Nigeria. When she was younger, her mother introduced her to the world of literature, which she instantly fell in love with. Fadeke’s realization that she could stretch her imagination to unparalleled heights vaccinated her, for she soon became obsessed with telling her own stories, showing her ability to create and seeing how far she can truly stretch her imagination for the world to see. One of her main goals in poetry and writing is for her readers not to merely be pulled by the strong emotions within her poems, but to also feel the transport to a new world. She doesn’t have a specific preference for a poetry type, for she likes to dabble with various styles.
Rohan Healy: is a senior student of International Studies at the American University in Dubai. Rohan was born in South Africa and moved to Dubai in 2006. He has always loved two things in book format: history and fantasy. He has also been a huge fan of the Lord of the Rings and an avid history enthusiast since is childhood. Rohan likes writing that connects dots and tells bigger stories but with a personal, lived-in tale. He hopes that people who read his poems or stories get a sense that are reading beyond words, taking a few short steps into an instance, a time and place far from where they are.
Dana Hachwa: is majoring in Journalism (English track) at the American University in Dubai. Dana sees writing as a vehicle through which she can share hidden, intriguing information or perspectives on places, objects and events. Through her writing, she tries to show her readers how what may seem boring or mediocre can actually be the opposite.
Dr. Pamela Chrabieh: is a scholar, writer, visual artist, and activist. Author of several books and papers with a 20+ year experience in higher education, communication, content creation, and the arts, she has exhibited her artworks in Canada, Lebanon, and the United Arab Emirates. Previously Associate Professor of Middle Eastern Studies at the American University in Dubai, she currently owns and manages a Beirut-based company offering expertise in Learning and Communication.
http://pamelachrabiehblog.com and http://spnc.co
Dr. Sharihan Al-Akhras: is the winner of the short story competition at the University of Jordan for the year 2007. She recently completed her PhD on Milton and Middle-Eastern mythology. At the moment she is in the process of co-editing a collection of essays entitled: “Women (Re)Writing Milton”. Her interests include Early Modern Literature, Middle-Eastern mythology, the demonic, Arab female authorship, East-West relations, and media.
Lorette C. Luzajic: is a mixed media artist and the editor of The Ekphrastic Review at www.ekphrastic.net, a journal dedicated exclusively to literature inspired by visual artwork, and her own poems and stories have been published in around 200 magazines, journals and blogs. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Applied Arts in Journalism, and she focuses on creative work in visual art, photography, poetry, and art writing. Lorette teaches workshops on ekphrastic writing and on art without drawing. Her art shows regularly at her home in Toronto, Canada, and she has also exhibited her work in other cities around the world like Brisbane, Bristol, Edinburgh, Los Angeles, San Diego, Chicago, New York, Yucatan, and, recently, Tunisia, where she participated in an international artists symposium (creating paintings for the Ministry of Culture and exhibiting in two exhibitions in Tunis and Hammamet). Her website, www.mixedupmedia.ca, is where she showcases her work and posts her latest news.
Sadika Kebbi: is a corporate trainer and workshop designer. Sadika is known for her unique storytelling style. She is also a TEDx speaker and a member of the National Storytelling Network in the US.
Sadika is a John Maxwell Executive Director and one of his licensed and certified Coaches, Speakers, Trainers.
She is also the author of two books. The first one is academic and is entitled “The Temptations of the Flesh in Madame Bovary and the Awakening”, the second is a collection of 20 short stories entitled “The Hidden Face of Scheherazade”. Sadika has also published two research essays, articles and many short stories in diverse national and international magazines.
In 2016, Sadika founded an NGO called ‘Kun Ensan’, ‘Being Human’, which aims at co-existence peace building and bridging gaps between different political, social and religious communities within Lebanon, mainly through storytelling. Based on her experience in public speaking and storytelling, Sadika noticed how titles and labels fade away and eventually disappear once a human heart is touched.
D. R. James: has taught college writing, literature, and peace-making for 35 years and lives in the woods near Saugatuck, Michigan. Poems and prose have appeared in a variety of journals and anthologies, his latest of eight poetry collections are If god were gentle (Dos Madres Press) and Surreal Expulsion (The Poetry Box), the microchapbook All Her Jazz is free and downloadable-for-folding at the Origami Poems Project, and a new chapbook, Flip Requiem, will be released in Spring 2020 (Dos Madres Press). www.amazon.com/author/drjamesauthorpage
Marilena Falcone was born and raised in Rome, Italy, where she earned her master’s degree in biomedical mechanical engineering and started a career in IT. In 2008, Marilena moved to Dubai following her husband. Here, she had the unique chance to pursue her original passion for the humanities and for writing. She has been a contributor for several online magazines and paper publications both in Italy and in the UAE.
Mary Jacob is Californian relocated to Wales. Her poems appear in US and UK journals such as Ink Sweat and Tears, Uut Poetry, Surreal Poetics, Visual Verse, Long Exposure and more. From 2015-2018, she organised the Words& poetry series at the Aberystwyth Arts Centre.
Dorine Potel (born in 1982, in France) obtained her degree from the National School of Decorative Arts, ENSAD, in Paris, in 2006. She studied then under the two eminent artists, Florence Paradeis and Brice Dellsperger. Very soon after her graduation, she worked as a photographer in advertising. That experience left its mark on her thinking, as it confirmed once and for all the power of various forms of discourse and image manipulation, as well as the fragility of our imagination.
Henceforth, in making her images, she has paid careful attention to what what we see and the questions we ask, as well as our imaginary, while avoiding one-sided interpretations. Photographs and videos are, for Dorine Potel, two ways of keeping in direct touch with the world, hidden as it is under its endless representations.
She currently lives and works in France and Lebanon.
Her work has been exhibited at Beirut Art Center (Lebanon), Espace Gred in Nice, the International Photography Festival in Lianzhou, China, the Baudoin Lebon Gallery in Paris and the headquarters of the French General Confederation of Labour, CGT, in Montreuil.
Professor Fiona Sampson is a leading British poet and writer. Published in thirty-seven languages, she’s received international awards in the US, India, Macedonia, Albania and Bosnia. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, Fellow of the English Association and Fellow of the Wordsworth Trust, she’s received an MBE from the Queen For Services to Literature, and published twenty-seven books. National prizes include the Newdigate Prize, Cholmondeley Prize, Hawthornden Fellowship, and various awards from the Arts Councils of England and of Wales, Society of Authors, Poetry Book Society and the Arts and Humanities Research Council. A former violinist, she is also a broadcaster and newspaper critic, and was editor of Poetry Review 2005-12. Her biography, In Search of Mary Shelley (2018), has been internationally critically acclaimed and was shortlisted for the Biographers Club Slightly Foxed Prize. The poems in her new poetry collection Come Down (published Feb 2020) have received two major European prizes, the 2019 Naim Frashëri Laureateship of Albania and Macedonia, and the 2020 European Lyric Atlas Prize, Bosnia. She is Professor of Poetry at the University of Roehampton, and has recently completed a new biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
Dr. Susan Azar Porterfield: Dr. Porterfield writes poetry and essays about poetical matters. Born in Chicago, she has a Ph.D. in Nineteenth-Century British Literature and a M.A. in British art from the Courtauld Institute in London. She is the recipient of an Illinois Arts Grant for poetry, the Cider Press Review Editor’s Prize for poetry for her book, Dirt, Root, Silk, and she won a Fulbright Grant to Lebanon, which resulted in her book of poetry, Kibbe.
Dr. Hanna Saadeh: Lebanese-born Dr. Hanna Saadeh, MD is both a creative writer and an infectious disease specialist in Oklahoma City, OK. He travelled to the US in 1971 for completing his post graduate medical training. The twenty-year Lebanese Civil War prevented him from returning to his fatherland, thus making Oklahoma his second home, where he has been productive as both physician and writer. Dr. Saadeh has authored five poetry books, four novels, and a collection of short stories.
Salma Ahmad Caller is an Egyptian/British artist and art historian, who was born in Iraq and grew up in Nigeria and Saudi Arabia. She now lives in the UK. Salma’s art practice involves creating an imagery of the narratives of body that have shaped her own body and identity across profound cultural divides. Her work is strongly visual but also incorporates text and sound works. It is an investigation of the painful and contradictory mythologies surrounding the female body, processes of exoticization, and the legacy of colonialism as a cross-generational transmission of ideas, traumas, bodies and misconceptions. Her art practice is informed by a Masters in Art History and Theory, having studied medicine, and teaching cross-cultural perspectives at Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford.
For more on Salma’s works, please visit https://www.salmaahmadcaller.com/
Maria Donovan is a British author writing short fiction and novels as well as factual content related to research interests in people, history, place, medicine and science, writing craft and the publishing process. Maria’s writing is informed by her experiences as a nurse, traveler, musician and performer and as a university lecturer (how did that happen?) as well as insights into the human condition from her own slightly strange perspective. Maria is also author of the novel The Chicken Soup Murder, which was a finalist for the Dundee International Book Prize.
For books by Maria Donovan, please visit her Amazon page.
Reem Bassous is a Lebanese-American artist raised in Athens, Greece until she was four years old due to the Lebanese civil war. Later, Reem Bassous received her Bachelor of Arts from The Lebanese American University in Beirut, Lebanon and her Master of Fine Arts from The George Washington University in Washington DC. She is an instructor at Leeward Community College and was a lecturer at the University of Hawaii at Manoa for 9 years. Her paintings and drawing installations have been featured in international exhibitions including the Millais Gallery in Southampton and the Brunei Gallery in London, England; and the RamsayOng Gallery in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
Bassous’s regional and national exhibitions include shows at the Honolulu Museum of Art, Hawaii, The Meadows Museum, Louisiana, and the Washington Studio School Gallery, in Washington DC, WhiteBox Gallery, and the Painting Center in New York City. She is the recipient of the Glassman Award, the Langenkamp Award in Abstract Painting, the John Young award, and was the winner of the 2013 Kafiye Project Competition at Kaflab, New York City.
Much of the artist’s work deals with her memories of the Lebanese Civil War and its aftereffects. Memory for Forgetfulness, in the collection of the Honolulu Museum of Art, shows the destruction caused by this conflict.
For more on Reem’s work please visit her personal page https://www.reembassous.studio/ or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reem_Bassous
Dr. Adnan Mahmutović has a PhD in English Literature from Stockholm University and MFA in Creative Writing, City University of Hong Kong. He has lectured at the Department of English, Stockholm University, since 2007 and acted as the fiction editor at Two Thirds North, a journal of transnational writing, since 2010.
He frequently reviews for scholarly journals in literary studies and creative writing. Below is the list of major publications. Besides these he has published scholarly articles in books and journals such as Studies in the Novel, Writing in Practice, Transnational Literature, Mosaic, ImageTexT Interdisciplinary Comics Studies, American Studies in Scandinavia, Short Fiction in Theory and Practice, The Journal of Postcolonial Cultures and Societies, The Journal of Contemporary Literature, The Coleridge Bulletin.
His stories and creative non-fiction appear widely in the UK and US magazines, and his essay “Comics, War and Ordinary Miracles” has been adapted for BBC Radio.
He is a recipient of many awards for fiction and has served a judge on a number of literary prizes, including Neustadt Prize for Literature.
Nireka Dhameja is s sophomore student, currently doing her Bachelors in Psychology and a minor in English Literature at the American University in Dubai. Nireka was born in India, moved to South Africa, then Toronto, and finally Dubai. She loves the freedom of writing, drawing on her experiences but at the same time leaving room for a little magic. She is also passionate about music, dance, and photography. She hopes that her words create an emotional impact, even if for a few seconds, like she feels when she dances: as if she has been holding her breath forever and is now finally exhaling.
Joan Leotta
Author, Story Performer
“Encouraging words through Pen and Performance”
Giulia Goes to War, Letters from Korea, A Bowl of Rice, Secrets of the Heart. Historical fiction in Legacy of Honor Series
Simply a Smile–collection of Short Stories
WHOOSH! Picture book from THEAQ You can download a mini-chapbook of Joan Leotta’s poems at https://www.origamipoems.com/files/Books%20/2016/Joan_Leotta_-_Dancing_Under_The_Moon_2016R.pdf
For more about Joan Leotta’s work atwww.joanleotta.wordpress.com and Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Joan-Leotta-Author-and-Story-Performer/188479350973
Amal Haig is a Lebanese-born artist living in Greece. She began drawing cartoons at the age of six, and by nineteen, she was already under the spell of Van Gogh, Matisse and Picasso. By then, she decided to study art and started painting subconsciously, as gestures or applied paint marks, smudges and lines stimulated her fantasy as more recognizable figures begin to emerge. The legacy of the first generation of Modern artists, has a big influence on Amal, yet she frequently sets up her own regulations and restrictions before beginning her works; for example, her pallet will only consist of few pigments, or she may only concentrate on one part of a picture leaving the rest as one single flat color; only within restrictions does she find absolute freedom. Quite often, she prefers using opposite tensions between colors and areas by intensifying accents of bright colors, and painterly sections scribbled over with drawing-like lines. In her paintings, one will find cheerfulness reflected in the use of many bright colors. Amal personally feels that a painting should emanate something positive, a vibration of rhythm that you follow unconsciously. Amal also customizes clothes, pottery, glass and other material. Amal has exhibited her works in Lebanon, the USA, and Greece.
Christine Murray lives in Dublin with her two children Tadhg and Anna. Her poetry has been widely published, both in print and online, in chapbooks, anthologies, and journals. She founded and edits Poethead; A Poetry Site that is dedicated to platforming work by women poets, their translators, and editors. She is an active member of Fired! Irish Women Poets and the Canon which seeks to celebrate and draw awareness to the rich cultural heritage of Irish women poets through awareness-raising and reading. She currently curates the Fired! archive at RASCAL (Research And Special Collections Available Locally- Queen’s University, Belfast).
Christine Murray’s latest poetry collection “Gold Friend” is forthcoming in Autumn 2020 with Turas Press, Dublin.
Poethead Website: http://www.poethead.wordpress.com
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/celizmurray
RASCAL: http://www.rascal.ac.uk/institutions/fired-irish-women-poets-and-canon
Awais Khan was born in Lahore, Pakistan. ‘In the Company of Strangers’ is his first novel published by the Book Guild and Simon & Schuster. He is a graduate of The University of Western Ontario and Durham University. He studied Creative Writing at Faber Academy. His work has appeared in The Aleph Review, The Missing Slate, MODE, Daily Times and The News International. He has appeared for Interviews on Voice of America, Samaa TV, City42, Maverix Media and PTV Home. He is represented by Annette Crossland (A for Authors Agency Ltd, London).
In his free time, he likes to read all types of fiction, especially historical fiction and psychological thrillers. He is hard at work on his forthcoming novels.
Hedy Habra was born in Egypt and is of Lebanese origin. She has authored three poetry collections, most recently, The Taste of the Earth (Press 53 2019). Tea in Heliopolis won the USA Best Book Award and was finalist for the International Book Award, and Under Brushstrokes was finalist for the USA Best Book Award and the International Book Award. Her story collection, Flying Carpets, won the Arab American Book Award’s Honorable Mention and was finalist for the Eric Hoffer Award. Her book of criticism, Mundos alternos y artísticos en Vargas Llosa focuses on the visual aspects of the Peruvian Nobel’s narrative. A fourteen-time nominee for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, her work appears in Cimarron Review, Bitter Oleander, Gargoyle, Nimrod and Verse Daily. Her website is hedyhabra.com
Nour Rouhana is an architecture student at The American University in Dubai. She enjoys writing poetry and short stories during her free time.
Elham El Dweik is currently a third-year Architecture student (at the American University in Dubai) with a particular interest in Literature and Philosophy. For Elham, poetry is a form of catharsis that aims to free her from the bonds of society and the past.
Mohamed Salama
Sultan Al-Halabi
Sahar Ghavami
Zafer Tawakol
Reem Al Shuaybat
Mira Matar
Nireka Dhameja
Melissa Mazman
Joyce Mansour
Danya El-Malik is a 20-year-old student at the American University in Dubai studying Digital Production and Storytelling. I love writing screenplays for my major for both film and television episodes. In my free time, I enjoy writing many songs as well as poems and short stories often exploring magical realism.
Grace Stech
Indelible 