MANOA online v. 3

Crossing Over, the summer 2007 issue of MANOA, marks the sixtieth anniversary of one of the most significant events of the twentieth century: when India achieved its independence from Great Britain and was partitioned into two countries, Pakistan and India.

The issue was launched on August 23 in New Delhi, India, at the American Center, U.S. Embassy, and on October 22 in Honolulu, Hawai‘i, at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.

Cosponsored by Zakir Husain College, Delhi University, the August launch featured a panel of writers and scholars moderated by Sukrita Paul Kumar, guest editor of Crossing Over. The panelists were film director and writer Gulzar; writer and editor Urvashi Butalia, of the feminist publishing house Zubaan; scholar Shail Mayaram, of the Center for the Study of Developing Societies; and scholar and writer C. M. Naim, of the University of Chicago. Those attending the event included teachers and students from many colleges in Delhi.

Sponsors of the event in October included the UHM Center for South Asian Studies and the UHM English Department.

The publication of MANOA is supported by grants from the Hawai‘i State Foundation on Culture and the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Where the Rivers Meet, the winter 2006 issue of MANOA, includes award-winning fiction by Alexis Wright and Roger McDonald. Wright is represented by an excerpt from Carpentaria, the novel that won the 2007 Miles Franklin Literary Award, Australia’s most prestigious literary prize. A writer, researcher, and social commentator, she is one of Australia’s best-known indigenous writers and is a member of the Waanyi nation of the southern highlands of the Gulf of Carpentaria.

“Bullock Run,” Roger McDonald’s contribution to Where the Rivers Meet, was recently selected for inclusion in the 2008 edition of Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards, the prestigious American anthology series edited by Laura Furman. McDonald is the author of two books of nonfiction, Shearers’ Motel and The Tree in Changing Light, and of seven novels, 1915, Slipstream, Rough Wallaby, The Slap, Water Man, Mr Darwin’s Shooter, and The Ballad of Desmond Kale, which won the 2006 Miles Franklin Award. He lives near Braidwood, on the Southern Tablelands of New South Wales.