Director:

Rita Banerjee is the Executive Creative Director of the Cambridge Writers’ Workshop and teaches in the Department of African, Middle Eastern, and South Asian Languages and Literatures at Rutgers University. She received her doctorate in Comparative Literature from Harvard and her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Washington, and her writing appears in Poets & Writers, The Rumpus, Painted Bride Quarterly, Mass Poetry, Hyphen Magazine, Los Angeles Review of Books, Electric Literature, VIDA: Women in Literary Arts, AWP WC&C Quarterly, Queen Mob’s Tea House, Riot Grrrl Magazine, The Fiction Project, Objet d’Art, KBOO Radio’s APA Compass, and elsewhere. Her first collection of poems, Cracklers at Night (Finishing Line Press), received First Honorable Mention for Best Poetry Book of 2011-2012 at the Los Angeles Book Festival, and her novella, A Night with Kali, in Approaching Footsteps (Spider Road Press), released in November 2016. Her new full-length poetry collection, Echo in Four Beats, will be released by Finishing Line Press in February 2018, and her edited volume, CREDO: An Anthology of Manifestos and Sourcebook for Creative Writing, will be released by C&R Press on March 7, 2018. She is currently working on a novel, a book on South Asian literary modernisms, and a collection of lyric essays. Her work is represented by literary agent Natalie Kimber at the Rights Factory.  You can learn more about her work at ritabanerjee.com or on Twitter @Rita_Banerjee.

Writers:

Hanan R. Attar is a modern day nomad. Since the beginning of the millennium, she’s lived in six major cities in four countries and twenty apartments. In addition to establishing a new domicile at regular intervals, Hanan is a bonafide globetrotter having traveled to more than forty countries for both pleasure and work. She has a bilingual MBA from IESE Business School in Barcelona, Spain and a B.A. in Mathematics from Mount Holyoke College. Hanan currently resides in Munich, Germany where she is writing primarily non-fiction accounts of her travels and experiences indulging in luxury wellness concurrent to a full-time role in e-commerce.  You can learn more about her work by visiting her website: www.hananrattar.com.

Emily Blewett is an editor based in Munich who writes about finance by day and everything else by night. She has written a variety of short stories and poems, and is currently working on a dystopian novel for young adults. Her journalistic work has been published in the Guardian and BBC amongst other news channels. When she´s not typing, she likes to explore new ideas for stories. These mostly come whilst hiking, travelling and talking to people.

 

Df. Davis is an American author, originally from New York, presently resident in Munich. He considers himself a “Songwriter in the pre-success stage”, nonetheless currently working on two novels: A tribute to his deceased parents (which increasingly resembles a Quentin Tarantino screenplay) a somewhat autobiographical recounting of his 4 years as a rockabilly guitarist, playing mostly for motorcycle gangs and tattoo conventions.

 

 

 

Born in Mauritius, Priya N. Hein is the author of several popular children’s books published in English, French, Creole and German. She writes a monthly children’s feature for an award-winning British newspaper and is occasionally commissioned to write for other publications such as KULTURAUSTAUSCH, a journal for international perspectives. A finalist of the TOYP 2014 Award, her books have received favourable reviews in the press including an interview with Germany’s leading national newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung.  You can learn more about her work by visiting her website: www.priyahein.com.

 

Elena K. is an aspiring author based in Munich . So far she has nothing published apart from scientific papers as her day job is biologist. She submitted her first story under the name Elena Beate and she is waiting to be rejected in order to submit it again. She enjoys writing speculative fiction and contemporary fantasy and is currently working on a post-apocalyptic novel. Her literary influences come from diverse fields of fiction: V.Woolf, U. Eco, G. G. Márquez, J. R. R. Tolkien, F. Kafka, J-P Sartre, A. Camus, M. Atwood, P. K. Dick to name a few. twitter: @Elena_Beate.

 

John Oleani was born in London within the sound of Bow Bells and grew up in England, Belgium, and Australia. He has lived and worked abroad extensively including Switzerland and the USA. Travelling is in his middle name – Peregrine – and in his blood but for the past eight years he has bedded comfortably down near Munich, Germany. With a degree in Rural Land Management and a post-grad in Advanced Farm and Business Management he has enjoyed three main work incarnations: Land and Countryside Management, Fitness and Health, Social and Environmental Living with Sustainable Structures. Now he is exploring the exciting new fourth one of Writing to bring messages across to help facilitate and support change on an Individual, Social and Environmental level.   He has always played with words and communication and written articles and publicity materials. Increasingly, as a native English speaker, he finds himself also being asked to check and polish the language of translated web sites and other social media. His stories are diverse and somewhat quirky but all contain a journey of sensual awareness, eroticism, life themes, humour and usually supply an unexpected twist. The writing aims to provoke and stimulate reconnection to self-belief and awareness and heal the rift in the relationship between women and men. His first book of short stories is nearing completion and he is also working on two novels.

Esther Pfaff is a Munich based fiction-writer.  Her stories tell about love and life, everybody’s struggle for happiness and all the little things that happen inbetween. Nothing has been published yet but this shall change over the year- Fingers crossed! She is currently working on a short story collection and the draft novel “17 pictures” (working title). In “17 pictures”, she explores the lives of two women of different generations dealing with a family break up and their way back into life. Major inspirations are writers like Joan Didion, Siri Hustvedt, Elizabeth Gilbert ( she did not just write Eat Pray Love 🙂 ), John Irving and Ernest Hemingway – just to name a few.  In daily life, she divides her time between her job as an IP lawyer, travelling and her home-based writing studio. Esther is a member of the Cambridge Writers Workshop since 2015 and was a student at a Master Class by Julia Cho, Hedgebrook (Seattle) December 5 to 14, 2015. To get in touch also see her website on facebook.com/Esther_Pfaff.

Moushumi Sen Sarma was busy studying the molecular neurobiology of honey bee dance communication, when she realized that the key to her happiness lay in communicating to the rest of the world the thoughts that kept dancing around in her head. So about six years ago, she decided to get out of her scientist skin and wear a new one, that of a creative writer. It was hard at first – the world seemed strange and scary, not to mention chaotic with a toddler running underfoot. But slowly she is getting the hang of it, at least she hopes so! While her Ph.D. will come in handy when she writes that surrealist science-fiction novel running around in her head rather aimlessly, in the meantime, she is working on the second draft of a literary novel.  She is also working on a bunch of short stories that might or might not turn into something bigger. When not writing, she is trying not to think of the first draft of another novel that she once wrote in a hurry and pushed aside. It would be easy if the manuscript did not keep kicking her shins. All in all, it’s a riot in there. If that was not enough, she has started moonlighting as a food-blogger. As The Minimalist Indian she blogs, tweets, pins, instagrams and facebooks, yes that last one might be a new word, because she is on this mission to change the narrative about Indian food. You can find her on theminimalistindian.wordpress.com