Introducing the first, mainstream, South Asian literary magazine: "CATAMARAN: SOUTH ASIAN AMERICAN WRITING" -- a bi-annual literary print magazine publishing works by new and upcoming South Asian creative artists (Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Sri Lankan, Nepali, Bhutanese) in North America. First issue coming out April 2003. Please send submissions to editors@catamaranmagazine.com, by December 7, 2002, in the form of attachments (Microsoft Word documents).

This magazine will feature short fiction, one act plays, poetry, non-fiction in the form of personal essays, travelogues, book and film reviews, photography, and one feature article per issue about a South Asian creative artist working in America. It will also contain information about South Asian American creative events such as art shows and performances. The magazine aims to give exposure to the rapidly growing circle of South Asian American artists who are as yet unable to break into the mainstream.

SPECIAL FEATURE: The first issue of CATAMARAN will carry as its debut feature a retrospective on the celebrated Kashmiri poet, Agha Shahid Ali, who passed away late last year. All those who were familiar with Shahid's poetry, or knew him personally, please send us your memories of him and his work so that we may celebrate Shahid and his work.

The editors of CATAMARAN will be looking for works that carry rich and unique potential and may even work with a writer on a selected piece to bring it up to publishable quality for the magazine. Our editorial board comprises three established fiction writers as fiction editors, two established poets as poetry editors, a book and film reviewer, and several assistant editors. Contributors will vary from issue to issue.

General Editor: Rajini Srikanth. Rajini Srikanth is the co-editor of Contours of the Heart: South Asians Map North America (1996) and co-editor of Bold Words: A Century of Asian American Writing (2001). rajini@catamaranmagazine.com

Senior Executive Editor and member of the Fiction Editorial team: Shona Ramaya. Shona Ramaya has published two books (a novel, Flute/Viking, Michel Joseph, Abacus, and a collection of stories, Beloved Mother, Queen of the Night/ Secker & Warburg, Penguin India), and her third book, a collection of stories, Operation Monsoon, will be published next fall by Graywolf Press. She has taught for several years at Hamilton College (Clinton, NY) and at Trinity College (Hartford, CT) as Writer-in-Residence.

Senior Fiction Editors: Tahira Naqvi. Tahira Naqvi grew up in Lahore, Pakistan. She teaches English at Western Connecticut State University and has taught Urdu at New York University and Columbia. She is a prolific writer and translator. Her short stories have appeared in journals and have been widely anthologized. Her first collection of stories, Attar of Roses and Other Stories of Pakistan, was published in 1997 (Lynne Rienner Publishers). Her second collection, Dying in a Strange Country, was published in 2001 (Toronto South Asia Review Press). She is currently at work on a novel. Among her translation credits are the works of Sa'adat Hasan Manto and Ismat Chugtai.

Vyvyan Loh. Vyvyane Loh's novel, Breaking the Tongue, will be published by Norton next year. Her poetry has been published in the United Kingdom. She is trained as a physician, but is active in dance, theater, and creative writing. Vyvyane is widely traveled in Asia and Brazil.

Senior Poetry Editors: Lloyd Schwartz. Lloyd Schwartz is a Frederick S. Troy Professor of English and served as director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Massachusetts Boston for many years. He is also the classical music editor of The Boston Phoenix and a regular commentator on NPR’s Fresh Air. He is the author of three books of poems, These People (Wesleyan University Press), Goodnight, Gracie (University of Chicago Press), and Cairo Traffic (University of Chicago Press), as well as the editor of Elizabeth Bishop and Her Art (University of Michigan Press) and co-editor, with Robert Giroux, of the forthcoming Library of America Elizabeth Bishop: Collected Poetry and Prose. His poems, articles and reviews have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, The New Republic, The Paris Review, Poetry magazine, and The Best American Poetry. He has won grants and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts and the US Information Agency, and is a three-time winner of ASCAP’s Deems Taylor Award. In 1994 he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism.

Reetika Vazirani. Reetika Vazirani was born in India and raised in Maryland. She received the "Discovery" award from The Nation. Her poems have appeared in Callaloo, International Quarterly, The Kenyon Review, The Nation, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. Her first collection of poems, White Elephants, was released as part of the Barnard New Women Poets Series. Her second book of poems, World Hotel, will be out in October 2002 from Copper Canyon Press.

Senior Editor, Book and Film Reviews:

Samir Dayal. Senior Editor, Book and Film Reviews: Samir Dayal. Samir Dayal is Associate Professor of English at Bentley College, Massachusetts. He is the editor, with an introduction, of Julia Kristeva's Crisis of the European Subject, François Rachline's Don Juan's Wager, Lucien Gubbay's Jews under Islam, and Patricia Gherovici's The Puerto Rican Syndrome (forthcoming), among other books. He has contributed chapters to several edited collections on South Asian literature and articles in journals including Amerasia Journal, Angelaki: A Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, College English, Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, Contemporary South Asia Review, Critical Asian Studies, Cultural Critique, Genders, MELUS, Postmodern Culture, and Socialist Review. He has also published some short fiction. Currently he is writing a book about contemporary South Asian fiction and film. samir@catamaranmagazine.com

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