Jalina Mhyana

About the Author

Jalina Mhyana is an award-winning American author who lives in exile in Florence, Italy.

She is the author of ‘Dreaming in Night Vision: A Story in Vignettes’ - a fusion of memoir, essays, and poems – as well as three poetry collections; Spikeseed (Bad Moon Books), The Wishing Bones (shortlisted and published by the Pudding House Press Chapbook Competition), and The Trauma Scope: Poems of Heartache & Optical Illusion (Indie published by Folly Bridge Press).

Her work was shortlisted in Perigee’s poetry competition judged by National Book Critics Circle Award winner Judy Jordan, and she has been nominated for several Pushcart Prizes, as well as Poet of the Week, “Best of Issue” for Eclectica Magazine for her essay “Ambidextrous Poesie: and “Best of the Net” for her essay “Knaves and Whoresons.” She has often been a Featured and Spotlight author and her work has been widely published.

Mhyana was founding editor of the literary journal Rock Salt Plum Review, worked as journalist for the Herald Union in Germany, and curated ekphrastic poetry readings at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, England.

Jalina is currently contributing editor for Sigh Press, a Tuscan literary journal, and recently moderated a panel at St. Mark’s Cultural Association in Florence.

Mhyana holds a graduate degree from the Bennington College Writing Seminars. Before being deported, Mhyana studied the History of Art at Oxford University where she won a travel grant to carry out research on folk art talismans in Vienna.

Jalina has been an expat for over twenty years, and has participated in readings in Japan, Amsterdam, Heidelberg, the USA, Oxford, and Florence. She is currently working on a memoir about her experience as an exile in a city that most would consider paradise.

In her online journal The Wandering Poet she writes about becoming invisible in Dracula country, making sketches of Chagall's stained glass windows in Germany, unwrapping god in Vienna, and delighting in overlooked beauty, rough drafts, marginalia, wabi sabi, and anything impefrect or unfinis