Chosen Tongue

Eleonora Balsano
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A podcast about translingual writers and their journeys.

  1. 6D AGO

    Cristina A. Bejan: Romanian the soul, English the freedom

    An award-winning author, theatre artist and spoken word poet, Dr. Cristina A. Bejan has published books in all of her genres (history, poetry, playwriting). Her plays have been performed in 4 countries and her hit play DISTRICTLAND was bought for TV development. She has appeared as an expert on A&E's The History Channel, C-SPAN, and multiple Romanian TV channels. Her work has been featured in the Washington Post, Times Literary Supplement, Foreign Policy, Libertatea and ELLE Romania magazine ... among many more print and audio outlets. In NYC she has performed at La MaMA Experimental Theatre Club and launched 5 published plays at The Drama Book Shop. Bejan is the only Rhodes Scholar (since the establishment of the scholarship in 1903) to hold Romanian citizenship and the recipient of the the George Parkin Distinguished Service Award 2025 (Rhodes Trust). She earned her Masters and PhD at the University of Oxford, fully funded by merit-based Rhodes and Fulbright scholarships and many grants. Bejan is also the Executive Director of Bucharest Inside the Beltway, a multicultural arts & culture platform that she co-founded in 2014 to promote local and international inclusive voices in the arts. She is currently working on a number of writing projects while auditing classes at the Sorbonne.  In this conversation, Cristina reflects on Romanian identity and on the tension between sentiment and practicality that runs through both the culture and the language. We talk about her evolving relationship to Romanian, the weight of national narratives, and what it means to move from emotional inheritance toward conscious choice. The poem we mention during the interview is part of the book Green Horses on the Wall: https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/green-horses-on-the-walls-by-cristina-a-bejan/

    34 min

  2. FEB 8

    Daniel Peña: We're products of everything

    Daniel Peña is a Pushcart Prize-winning writer and Associate Professor at the University of North Texas where he teaches in the PhD Program in Creative Writing.  Formerly, he was based out of the UNAM in Mexico City where he worked as Fulbright-Garcia Robles Scholar. A graduate of Cornell University and a former Picador Guest Professor in Leipzig, Germany, his writing has appeared in Ploughshares, The Rumpus, the Kenyon Review, Texas Monthly, NBC News, and The New York Times Magazine among  other venues. He's currently a regular contributor to the Guardian and the Ploughshares blog. His novel, Bang, is out now from Arte Publico Press. He lives in the beautiful Dallas-Fort Worth area. In this conversation, Daniel reflects on identity as something multiple and shifting, shaped by language, movement, and lived experience. We talk about race and belonging in the United States, the role of art as a form of resistance, and the ways language — and even something as ordinary as soccer — can become a bridge between worlds.

    34 min

  3. FEB 1

    Tayyba Kanwal: Identity is what you have, not who you are

    Tayyba Kanwal is a Pakistani-American writer from Houston, TX. Her short story collection, Talking with Boys, has been published in January 2026 by Black Lawrence Press. Her award-winning work has appeared in journals such as Wasafiri, Witness, Gulf Coast and Meridian. She holds an MFA from the University of Houston where she was an Inprint C. Glenn Cambor Fellow, and an MS from the University of Oregon. She serves as Literary Director at Inprint, Houston's premier literary arts organization, and Senior Editor at Conjunctions. In this episode, Tayyba reflects on her journey from Pakistan to the US, the role of Urdu and Punjabi in her life, and how these languages influence her storytelling. She also emphasizes the importance of authentic representation in literature and the evolving landscape of literary voices. Finally, Tayyba shares her insights on the intersection of mathematics and storytelling, and the emotional depth captured in her writing, particularly through the concept of 'dardh'.

    28 min

  4. 07/13/2025

    Heidi Marjamäki: There is no such thing as good enough

    My guest today is Heidi Marjamäki, a Finnish author based in Berlin. She studied in Scotland, worked in Oxford and London, and now serves as Associate Fiction Editor at Okay Donkey. Heidi's stories have appeared in ergot., Crow & Cross Keys, and others. She won the 2022 Ghost Story Supernatural Fiction Award and a 2023 ThrillPit mentorship. We discussed writing in a second language, the influence of her Finnish heritage, and the creative freedom found in Berlin's literary community. Heidi also spoke about translingual storytelling, her editorial work, and the value of embracing mistakes in the writing process.

    30 min

  5. 07/06/2025

    Sneha Subramanian Kanta: The Cartography of Language

    Sneha Subramanian Kanta is a poet, academic, and editor born in Mumbai and based in Mississauga, Canada. She's the author of five chapbooks and the 2025 Woodhaven Artist in Residence at the University of British Columbia. Her collection Hiraeth, an honouree for the Bronwen Wallace Award, was published by Apple Books and Penguin Random House Canada. Her work has been supported by Tin House, Granta, the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, and others. We discussed her journey as a bilingual poet writing in English and Hindi, the emotional weight of ancestral exile, and the cultural memory that shapes her work. She spoke about translating her own poems, navigating identity across languages, and offered advice to writers working between linguistic worlds.

    25 min

  6. 06/29/2025

    Lidija Hilje: Doubting and doing it anyway

    Lidija Hilje is a Croatian writer and book coach. After earning a law degree, she spent a decade practicing in Croatian courts before transitioning to writing and coaching—this time in English, her second language. Her work has appeared in The New York Times and other publications. She lives in Zadar, Croatia, with her husband and two daughters. Her debut novel, Slanting Towards the Sea, will soon be published by Simon & Schuster in the US and Daunt Books in the UK. In this episode, we discussed Lidija's journey from law to literature, the shift from writing in Croatian to English, and the cultural expectations that shape storytelling. She spoke about the evolution of her novel, the complexities of translation, and the imposter syndrome she sometimes faces as a non-native English writer.

    37 min

  7. 06/22/2025

    Leila Farjami: Persian is the river, English the sea

    Leila Farjami is an Iranian-American poet, translator, and psychotherapist based in Los Angeles. After nearly three decades of writing in Persian, she has in recent years turned her focus to poetry in English—a shift shaped by her experiences of censorship, exile, and a search for expressive freedom. Her work has appeared in Ploughshares, The Cincinnati Review, Pleiades, Mississippi Review, The Penn Review, and many other journals and anthologies. She's the recipient of The Cincinnati Review's Schiff Award in poetry and has been recognized as a finalist for the Prufer Poetry Prize and the Perugia Press Prize. We discussed the complexities of writing across languages, the emotional labour of translation, and how her poetry navigates identity, displacement, and heritage. Leila also shared how her work honours her ancestors and what it means to write as a woman shaped by—and resisting—a patriarchal world.

    30 min

  8. 06/15/2025

    Vesna Main: Belonging is overrated

    Vesna Main is a Croatian-born writer who has lived in London for many years and now splits her time between the UK and rural France. Her work spans a range of forms, including the short story collection Temptation, the Goldsmiths Prize-shortlisted novel-in-dialogue Good Day?, the autofiction Only A Lodger… And Hardly That, and her most recent novel Waiting for A Party, which features a nonagenarian woman yearning for intimacy in prose that echoes Molly Bloom. We discussed writing in a second language, her interest in autofiction, and the themes of identity and belonging that run through her work. Vesna also spoke about the feeling of never quite arriving, and why she sees writing as a lifelong act of hope.

    36 min
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About

A podcast about translingual writers and their journeys.

Information

  • Creator
    Eleonora Balsano
  • Years Active
    2024 - 2026
  • Episodes
    45
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2023
  • Show Website
    Chosen Tongue