Watch the book trailer for Penelope Embodied.
Karine Leno Ancellin was born and grew up in New York city until she moved first to Paris, then London, and further out to the Sahara region in West Africa, where she lived and reported from Mauritania as a journalist. She then spent time in China, India, and Israel.
She has four amazing boys with their wonderful father, yet they have parted ways. She studied Literature and Anthropology at the Charles V Institute of Paris VII and worked on Kaleidoscopic identities of Muslim Characters for her PhD at the Vrije Universiteit of Brussels. As a professor of poetry, prose and drama, she constantly rereads the classics. She loves Hanna Arendt, Sappho, W.H. Auden, Pablo Neruda, ee cummings, Sylvia Plath, Beckett, and Borges, among others. Music is her higher joy.
She also translates texts of literature and writes essays. Her first poetry collection The Missing Angle (Riza Press, 2019) addresses the fluidity in the architecture of contemporary emotions, as ways of being together have morphed, from the ancient Greeks to modern times.
Ancellin focuses on digitization of rapports with virtual media intruding on personal relationships. In a growingly divided yet globalized world, she observes the prism of societal atomization on intimacy and personal feelings. She is on a pursuit through time (ancient–modern) and through space, (different culture–language) to magnify ways and thoughts on tenderness and similar tangential human expressions.
In 2015, Karine Leno Ancellin cofounded a poetry association, A Poets’ Agora, with Angela Lyras. The association meets in Athens, holding events, hosting a residency, publishing work, and participating in other activities that relate to Greece and Poetry.
Forthcoming will be her first work of fiction, on the Tuareg struggle for their own land, Azawad.
For more information, check out her website:
karinelenoancellin.net
Paperback: 54 pages
Publisher: Kelsay Books (July 21, 2023)