Mary Anne Mohanraj

Mary Anne Amirthi Mohanraj
Born	(1971-07-26) July 26, 1971 Colombo, Sri Lanka

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."The Big Idea: Mary Anne Mohanraj" November 21, 2013 Whatever: The Big Idea John Scalzi</ref>

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 of 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 - June 2007, she was a Visiting Professor in the MFA Program at Roosevelt University. From 2007-2008, she was a Visiting Professor at Northwestern University, in the Center for the Writing Arts. She taught at the Clarion Workshop in July 2008.^[2][3] Since 2008, she has worked as a Clinical Assistant Professor in the English Department at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). She has been Assistant Director of Asian and Asian American Studies at UIC since 2009.

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. 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 until 2003. In 2004 she founded the Speculative Literature Foundation,^[4] which she still directs, and is a founding member and Executive Director of Desilit,^[5] an organization designed to support South Asian and diaspora writers. Mohanraj founded and is Executive Director of the biennial Kriti Festival,^[6] 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".^[7]

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."^[8] 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.^[9]

Personal life

Mohanraj lives in Oak Park, Illinois, a Chicago suburb, with her partner, Kevin Whyte (a mathematician), and their children, daughter Kaviarasi Whyte (born May 18, 2007), and son Anandan Whyte (born September 24, 2009). She has two younger sisters, Dr. Mirna Mohanraj and Dr. Sharmila Mohanraj. Her parents, Dr. N.A.C. Mohanraj and Jacintha Mohanraj, live in Connecticut. She has stated that they wanted her to have an arranged marriage like theirs, to a Sri-Lanka-born Tamil Catholic boy whom they would choose.

Bibliography

Novels

• Kathryn in the City: A Choose-Your-Own-Erotic-Adventure (Melcher Media, 2003) (ISBN 1-59240-030-2)
• The Classics Professor: A Choose-Your-Own-Erotic-Adventure (Melcher Media, 2003) (ISBN 1-59240-031-0)
• The Stars Change (Circlet Press, 2013) (ISBN 978-1-61390-084-0)

Collections

• Torn Shapes of Desire (IAM [Intangible Assets Manufacturing], 1997) (ISBN 1-885876-03-3)
• Silence and the Word (Lethe Press, 2004) (ISBN 1-59021-014-X)
• Bodies in Motion: Stories (HarperCollins, 2005) (ISBN 0-06-078118-1)

Edited Works

• Aqua Erotica (Three Rivers Press, 2000) (ISBN 0-609-80656-4)
• Wet: More Aqua Erotica (Three Rivers Press, 2002) (ISBN 0-609-80897-4)
• The Best of Strange Horizons: Year One (Lethe Press, 2003) (ISBN 1-59021-036-0)

Nonfiction

• A Taste of Serendib: A Sri Lankan Cookbook (Lethe Press, 2003) (ISBN 1-59021-100-6)

Children's

• The Poet's Journey (Serendib Press, 2008) (ISBN 978-0-6151-8889-8) [as "Amirthi Mohanraj"]

References

External links

• Mohanraj's website. Contains links to her biography, bibliography, journal, and other areas of interest.
• Uniting Desi Writers and Readers Interview in India Currents Magazine by Ranjit Souri
• Mary Anne Mohanraj at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database

Authority control WorldCat VIAF: 49516221 LCCN: n97031693 GND: 130345091 BNF: cb150821217

Persondata
Name	Mohanraj, Mary Anne
Alternative names
Short description	American writer
Date of birth	26 July 1971
Place of birth	Colombo, Sri Lanka
Date of death
Place of death