Chosen Tongue – Details, episodes & analysis

Sumitra Singam is a Malaysian-Indian-Australian writer and psychiatrist living in Melbourne. Her work has been published widely, nominated for a number of Best Of anthologies, and was selected on Best Microfictions 2024.  She works in mental health. We discussed how Sumitra incorporates words from different languages into her stories and the impact of her Malay literary tradition on her writing style. Sumitra also explores the connection between trauma and language, highlighting the power of putting traumatic experiences into words and emphasizing the importance of language in shaping our understanding of ourselves and our experiences. 

Aleksandar Hemon is the author of The Lazarus Project, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the National Book Award, as well as The Question of Bruno; Nowhere Man, Love and Obstacles, The Book of My Lives, The Making of Zombie Wars, as well as a couple of non-fiction books. His most recent novel is The World and All That It Holds (2023)

Aleksandar Hemon has worked as a writer for Radio Sarajevo Youth Program, and then as a waiter, canvasser, bookseller, bike messenger, as well as a supervisor at a literacy center, and a teacher of English as a second language (all in Chicago). His work has been featured in The New Yorker, Esquire, Granta, The New York Times, Playboy, McSweeney’s, TriQuarterly, The Baffler, The Wall Street Journal, Tin House, Ploughshares and The Paris Review, among others. He’s written for film and television, most recently The Matrix Resurrections. He produces and releases music as Cielo Hemon. He has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a “genius grant” from the MacArthur Foundation, the Jan Michalski Prize for Literature, the PEN/ W.G. Sebald Award, a USA Fellowship, PEN/Jean Stein Oral History Grant etc. He has taught at Northwestern University, University of Illinois at Urbana/Champagne, Columbia College Chicago, University of Chicago, New York University. He finally settled at Princeton University, where he teaches now.

We discussed the changes a second language brings to the author's voice and perspective, as well as Hemon's connection to his native Sarajevo and how he translates the city for a foreign audience. Hemon also shared his experience of writing columns in Bosnian as a diasporic person and how writers should allow themselves to write in as many languages as they wish because languages are superpowers. 

Alina Stefanescu was born in Romania and lives in Birmingham, Alabama. Alina is the author of several publications, including a creative nonfiction chapbook, Ribald (Bull City Press Inch Series, Nov. 2020) and Dor, which won the Wandering Aengus Press Prize (September, 2021). Her debut fiction collection, Every Mask I Tried On, won the Brighthorse Books Prize (April 2018). Alina's poems, essays, and fiction can be found in Prairie Schooner, North American Review, World Literature Today, Pleiades, Poetry, BOMB, Crab Creek Review, and others. She serves as poetry editor for several journals, reviewer and critic for others, and Co-Director of PEN America's Birmingham Chapter. She is currently working on a novel-like creature. More online at www.alinastefanescuwriter.com. We discussed how Alina started writing creatively to bridge the gap between her Romanian and American identities, the self-censorship she feels as an immigrant writer and how her voice changes when switching between Romanian and English. 

Ana Maria Caballero is a Colombian-American literary artist whose work explores how biology delimits societal and cultural rites, ripping the veil off romanticized motherhood and questioning notions that package sacrifice as a virtue. She's the recipient of the Beverly International Prize, Colombia’s José Manuel Arango National Poetry Prize, the Steel Toe Books Poetry Prize, a Future Arts Writer Award, a Sevens Foundation Grant and has been a finalist for numerous other literary and arts prizes. We discussed how her themes and writing style have evolved with each language, the growing presence of digital and crypto poetry, and her use of AI in poetry and art, highlighting the different interpretations of prose and poetry, in Spanish and English. 

Caballero is the author of Mammal (forthcoming via Steel Tool Books, 2024); Cortadas (forthcoming from S/W Ediciones, 2025); A Petit Mal (Black Spring Press, 2023); Tryst (Alexandria Publishing, 2022); mid-life (Finishing Line Press, 2016); Reverse Commute (Silver Birch Press, 2014); Entre domingo y domingo (Valparaíso Ediciones, 2023 and 2014).  

She lives in Madrid with her husband and children. 

Alison Mooney is a poet, storyteller and dancer who has lived in France, the US, Ireland, Germany, and now lives in Brussels.  For many years she worked across Europe in the private sector, before joining the European Parliament 10 years ago. In 2020, Alison won the Cicero Speechwriting Award, from the US Professional Speechwriters Association, for a poetic motivational speech. In 2022, she was appointed speechwriter to the President of the European Parliament. In 2023, Alison self-published a collection of multilingual poetry: Balance – in mind, in body, in soul. The first edition was sold out within weeks and Alison has been giving poetry readings in Brussels, Dublin, Connemara, and France.

Her multilingual poetry collection is a journey on a tight-rope in search of balance: in mind, in body, in soul. Accompanyied by photography from award-winning photographer Sean Hayes, Alison Mooney’s book is graphically built like an art triptych. On one side, poems of grief, on the other poems of healing and suspended in the centre a speech on finding balance. 

You can listen to Alison's prize-winning motivational speech here.

Here, you can listen to Alison reading her poem Beyond You, from her collection. 

Mordecai Martin is an Ashkenazi Jewish writer, a Bisexual Psychiatric Survivor, an aspiring translator of Yiddish and Spanish, and a fifth generation New Yorker. He lives in Washington Heights, Manhattan with his wife, son, and cat. He is an MFA candidate at Randolph College in Lynchburg, VA. In his non-fiction he writes to explore family, history, place, and mental illness. In his fiction, he strives to chronicle and capture the peculiarities of voice, the miraculous nature of event, and the depths and edges of Jewish humanity. Using his translation skills, he hopes to create hybridized texts that make personal essays out of translator notes and prefaces, to confound the traditional separation between translator, translated, reader, writer, narrator and self. His creative non-fiction has appeared in Honey Literary, Catapult Magazine, Longleaf Review, Peach Magazine, Autofocus Lit, Anti-Heroin Chic Magazine and The Hypocrite Reader. His fiction has been featured in Identity Theory, Timber Journal, X-Ray Lit, Gone Lawn, Knight’s Library Magazine, Funicular, and Sortes.

Victoria Buitron is an award-winning writer who hails from Ecuador and resides in Connecticut. She received an MFA in Creative Writing from Fairfield University. Her debut memoir-in-essays, A Body Across Two Hemispheres, was the 2021 Fairfield Book Prize winner. A VONA fellow, her work has been selected for 2022’s Best Small Fictions and Wigleaf’s Top 50. In 2023, she received the Artistic Excellence Award from the Connecticut Office of the Arts. She is currently the Competitions Editor for Harbor Review. She had the joy and privilege of selecting the nonfiction, fiction, and poetry for the 2023 Connecticut Literary Anthology and will be returning in 2024 as the project’s nonfiction editor. In winter 2024, she will be working with Tin House to complete her poetry book and will later attend a writing residency by Sundress Publications in Knoxville, Tennessee. Because she embraces creative chaos, she is also working on a novel about love, violence, and betrayal.

We discussed her creative life between Spanish and English, her memoir, and how her mood sometimes dictates which language she will reading and writing in.

Music by Oleksi Holubiev & Monument Music

Pim Wangtechawat is a Thai-Chinese writer from Bangkok, Thailand. She graduated with Distinction from Edinburgh Napier University in Scotland with a Masters in Creative Writing. Her debut novel, The Moon Represents My Heart, was published by OneWorld Publications in the UK in June 2023. Television rights sold after a competitive auction to 21 Laps and Netflix, with actress Gemma Chan set to star and produce.

We discussed how Pim started writing in English, the doubts she faced in the beginning, and how today she advises young writers to own their multiculturalism and just tell their stories without being afraid. 

Music by Oleksi Holubiev & Monument Music

Andrea Jurjević is a Croatian poet, writer, and literary translator living in the US. She is the author of two poetry collections and a chapbook: In Another Country, winner of the 2022 Saturnalia Books Prize; Small Crimes, winner of the 2015 Philip Levine Prize; and Nightcall, which was the 2021 ACME Poem Company Surrealist Series selection. Andrea’s book-length translations from Croatian include Olja Savičević’s Mamasafari (Diálogos Press, 2018) and Marko Pogačar’s Dead Letter Office (The Word Works, 2020), which was shortlisted for the 2021 National Translation Award in Poetry.

You can read Only River is Fluent here: https://www.thenormalschool.com/blog/2023/10/11/andrea-jurjevic

Music by Oleksi Holubiev & Monument Music

Mathieu Cailler is the author of seven books: one novel, two short story collections, two volumes of poetry, and two children’s titles. His stories, poems, and essays have appeared in over one hundred publications, including The Saturday Evening Post and the Los Angeles Times. He is the recipient of numerous awards, most notably the Shakespeare Award, the Short Story America Prize, the New England Book Festival Award, the Los Angeles Book Festival Prize, and the Paris Book Festival Prize. 

We discussed how he decided to write children's books in Spanish, what makes him feel like a Frenchman in America and an American in France, and how strange and elating it is for him when people pronounce his name correctly.

Feel free to connect with him on social media @writesfromla or at mathieucailler.com.