Mary Ann Cain

Mary Ann Cain lives near the bend in one of the three rivers of Fort Wayne, Indiana, where she teaches prose writing, rhetoric, and Women’s Studies at Indiana University Purdue University Fort Wayne. Her fiction, memoirs, and blurred genre work have appeared in numerous literary journals, including The North American Review, The Denver Quarterty, The Sun: A Magazine of Ideas, Thirteenth Moon, Many Mountains Moving, and Hawai’i Pacific Review, among numerous others. She is the recipient of an Indiana Arts Commission Individual Artist grant, two residencies at the Mary Hambidge Center for Arts, and one at Hill House Writers’ Retreat. Her book on writing workshops, Revisioning Writers’ Talk: Gender and Culture in Acts of Composing, was published by SUNY Press in 1995. Forthcoming from Heinemann Boynton Cook is Breathing Space: Composing Public Places for Writing and Teaching, with co-authors Michelle Comstock and Lil Brannon. She and her husband, poet George Kalamaras, share a 1929 Tudor-style house with their beagle, Bootsie. She also teaches creative writing for the Three Rivers Jenbe Ensemble, a West African drumming and dance group for young people and is a jenbe player herself. India has also claimed her; she meditates in the tradition of Paramahansa Yogananda and traveled to India where she interviewed devotees of the legendary Anandamai Ma, spiritual advisor to Indira Gandhi, to learn about Indian women’s spiritual practices.