Juliette Rossant

Juliette Rossant

Stonefence Review




In 1980, I helped to found The Stonefence Review because I had found no other media for creative writers when I was at Dartmouth. I guess you could say Stonefence was originally "reactionary" — a reaction to the recent founding of the Dartmouth Review, whose conservatism troubled me... (go to founding of Stonefence...)
(see also Stonefence bio and the poem Hojali...)

Volume XXII, No. 1, Fall 2000

To Poetry, the Middle East and Back...

Juliette RossantI have been writing poetry since I was 10 years old. At Dartmouth, I studied under Richard Corum and Richard Eberhardt (and Kenneth Koch at Columbia during a semester off) and graduated from Dartmouth in 1981.

I pursued Philosophy studies at Columbia, Poetry under Robert Pinsky at Berkeley, and the " Writing Seminars" under David St. John at Hopkins , where I earned an MA in Creative Writing. I taught English, Composition, and Poetry at the Philips Academy at Andover (and founded on Apple computers there one summer a literary magazine, whose fate is unknown to me), then went to Istanbul, Turkey, to teach and later launch a career in journalism.

From Istanbul, I covered local politics and business, the Gulf War, and the Kurdish refugee crisis that followed for numerous international TV, Radio, and Press media including CNN, Australian Radio, Business Week, Petroluem Review, and the San Francisco Chronicle. I moved to Moscow, to cover not only upheavals in the new Russia but also politics and business in Central Asia including the Azeri-Armenian war over Nagorno-Karabakh and Caspian Sea oil developments. Somehow I managed to pick up Turkish, Azeri, and Russian as part of my survival gear.

I have witnessed (and survived) Yeltsin's attack on the Russian white house in Moscow, an Azeri rescue helicopter under fire from Armenian troops in Nagorno-Karabakh, long days with the Kurds during their starvation in the north of Iraq. My favorite absurd moment was to arrive in Ashgabat, Turkmenistan, after a three-day ride on a Turkish freight truck from Baku, Azerbaijan, and across the Caspian Sea by ferry, for the feted opening of what must have been Benetton's loneliest retail outpost. Such experiences have been quite vivid; recently, when Gourmet magazine asked me for an article about Central Asia (Gourmet, November 2000, page 67), I could see the marketplace so clearly that I only needed a few confirmations from people currently living there to complete the piece. [...]


(back to Stonefence Review Vol. XXII No. 1 Fall 2000)

(more in Juliette's bio for Super Chef)

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