Anastasia M. Ashman

Anastasia M. Ashman (born 1964) is an American author.

Background

Ashman was born in Berkeley, California, graduated from Berkeley High School in 1982, and received her A.B. from Bryn Mawr College in Classical Greek, Roman, and Near Eastern Archaeology in 1986. An expatriate for 9 years, she has resided in Rome and Kuala Lumpur and currently lives with her Turkish husband in Istanbul.

Ashman spent a decade in New York and Los Angeles media and entertainment circles, working in operations and administration for literary agents and producers of film, television, and Broadway theatre.

Career

Ashman is a cultural essayist and editor. Her arts, travel and culture journalism and criticism has appeared in a wide range of publications, from international business newspapers and newsmagazines, like the Hong Kong-based Dow Jones properties The Wall Street Journal Asia and Far Eastern Economic Review, to theThe Village Voice and National Geographic Traveler. She has written AbOUT Nyonya food, reviewed Tropical Classical, an essay collection by Pico Iyer and covered a posthumous anthology by Brion Gysin. For Cornucopia, the glossy magazine for connoisseurs of Turkey, she has written about the cultural contortions of joining a Turkish family.

Along with American writer Jennifer Eaton Gökmen, she is the co-editor of the nonfiction anthology Tales from the Expat Harem: Foreign Women in Modern Turkey (Emeryville: Seal Press, 2006). The anthology, by 29 expatriate women from five nations, spans the length and breadth of Turkey as well as the last four decades as scholars, artists, missionaries, journalists, entrepreneurs and Peace Corps volunteers assimilate into Turkish friendship, neighborhood, wifehood, and motherhood. The expatriate literature collection has risen to national top ten bestselling spots in the US and the UK, and is also published in Turkey, (Istanbul: Doğan Kitap, 2005) where it was a #1 national bestseller in January 2006, and has been translated into Turkish as Türkçe Sevmek (Istanbul: Doğan Kitap, 2005), with a foreword on womanhood, national identity and non-belonging by the controversial and award-winning Turkish novelist Elif Shafak.

Ashman's personal essays appear in the humor travel collection The Thong Also Rises: Further Misadventures From Funny Women on the Road (Palo Alto: Travelers’ Tales, 2005) and in The Subway Chronicles: Scenes From Life in New York (New York: Plume-Penguin, 2006).

Works

Awards/Honors

  • From the international relations group Daughters of Ataturk, Ashman and her Expat Harem co-editor were honored with the 2006 "Woman of Distinction Award", an annual title bestowed on women who have "demonstrated vision, leadership, innovation and professionalism" in "giving their talents to the international Turkish community". Other 2006 honorees include Güler Sabancı, Caroline Finkel, and Leslie Peirce.

See also

See Also

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