Meline toumani biography

Meline Toumani grew up in a close-knit Armenian community in New Jersey, and as in much of the Armenian diaspora, life revolved around commemorating and seeking recognition of the events of 1915, and the 1.5 million Armenians who died at the hands of the Ottoman Turkish government. A journalist by training, Toumani shocked friends and family by moving to Turkey and embarking on a journey to understand a people and a country she’d been taught were the enemy. The result is “There Was and There Was Not,” part political history, part deeply personal memoir.

Guests

• Meline Toumani Journalist; author, "There Was and There Was Not: A Journey Through Hate and Possibility in Turkey, Armenia, and Beyond"

Excerpted from “There Was And There Was Not” by Meline Toumani. Copyright 2014 Metropolitan Books. All rights reserved.

• 13:29:05

  MR. KOJO NNAMDIMeline Toumani grew up in a close-knit Armenian community in New Jersey. And the worldview

  •

  MELINETOUMANI

  Meline Toumani is a freelance writer and editor based in New York City. Her first book, There Was and There Was Not: A Journey Through Hate and Possibility in Turkey, Armenia, and Beyond, was published by Metropolitan Books in November 2014 and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. She has written about politics, ideas, books, and music for The New York Times Sunday Magazine and culture pages, Harper's, The Nation, n+1, Salon, The Boston Globe, Newsday, GlobalPost, The National, and Travel + Leisure. As a foreign reporter, she has worked in Turkey, Armenia, Georgia and Russia. Currently, she teaches graduate students in the Goucher College low-residency MFA program in Creative Nonfiction. 

   

  In 2002 and 2003, she was the coordinator of the Russian American Journalism Institute in Rostov-on-Don, Russia, and in 2007 she and was a journalism fellow in residence at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. 

   

  Her work has bee

  •

  MELINETOUMANI

  FINALIST FOR THE 2014 NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD

  FINALIST FOR THE 2015 DAYTON LITERARY PEACE PRIZE

  January 8, 2016 Interview with The Rumpusread... 

  “Toumani’s emotional responses to her experience in Turkey, and her honesty in navigating and describing them, lend her story the authority that can come only from a storyteller who recognizes that history is a matter of both fact and feeling. Although this book offers plenty of insight — funny, affectionate, often frustrated — into a unique diasporic culture, Toumani is ultimately less interested in what makes a person Armenian, Turkish or anything else than in what can happen when we start to think beyond those national identities."

  —Joanna Scutts, THE WASHINGTON POST

   

  “[A] superb narrative... Toumani, with admirable courage and the enviable skills of a more experienced historian, has written a memoir that delicately walks the line between the subjective nature of memoir and the objective details of the past.”

  —Meganne Fabrega, THE STAR TRIBUNE

   

  “There Was and Th