About Ciahnan
A writer and a scholar
I hold Masters degrees from the University of Chicago and Stony Brook University, and a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University at Buffalo. I am committed to using my craft to help me engage the world and those with whom I share it.
A lifelong reader
Born into a family of readers, some of my earliest memories are of my parents reading to me from Leaves of Grass, The Odyssey, The Iliad, and Edith Hamilton’s Mythology.
I started writing in high school, shortly after finishing Wallace Stegner’s Crossing to Safety.
A lifelong reader
Born into a family of readers, some of my earliest memories are of my parents reading to me from Leaves of Grass, The Odyssey, The Iliad, and Edith Hamilton’s Mythology.
I started writing in high school, shortly after finishing Wallace Stegner’s Crossing to Safety.
Whatever truth or goodness can be found in my work is largely due to the influence of writers like Fumiko Enchi, Jenny Erpenbeck, Paul Harding, Takashi Hiraide, Marilynne Robinson, and Iris Murdoch, whose books have taught me that there can be no beauty without substance, and nothing substantive in the absence of beauty.
I am similarly grateful for books like Benjamin Hale’s The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore, Mike Meginnis’s Fat Man and Little Boy, and Brian Castro’s Shanghai Dancing, whose daring and ingenuity spur me to listen more closely, to see more keenly, and to reach beyond the easy, the immediate, and the safe in order to tell my stories as they need to be told.
I don’t write to express myself or advance a particular agenda, but rather in order to see and to discover something of myself, the world, and those I share it with. And sometimes, a character steps out from behind the veil with a story to tell.
A family man
I am, finally, a husband, a father, a cook, an oenophile, a matero, a gym-goer, and a runner. I split my time between Pennsylvania and Maine, where my family has resided for more than a century.
Let’s Connect!
