Anastasia M. Ashman

Born and raised in California town of Berkeley, Ashman holds a degree in Classical Greek, Roman and Near Eastern Archaeology from Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania. A career essayist specializing in personal tales of cultural adventure, Tales from the Expat Harem is her first anthology, adding a new facet to ten years' experience evaluating and editing creative material in New York and Los Angeles media and entertainment, working for literary agents and producers of film, television, and Broadway theatre. Ashman has written various pieces for Cornucopia, a glossy magazine for connoisseurs of Turkey worldwide, for Asia's oldest newsweekly magazine, Dow Jones' Far Eastern Economic Review; and for art and literary sections of newspapers like The Asian Wall Street Journal and The Village Voice in New York City. Her essays will soon appear in the women’s humor collection The Thong Also Rises (Travelers’ Tales, September 2005) and The Subway Chronicles (Plume-Penguin, September 2006). She is at work on Berkeley to Byzantium: The Civilization of a California Adventuress, a cultural memoir charting the peaks and valleys of her adventurous life, from Manhattan to Asia Minor and Southeast Asia, where she lived for five years. Ashman currently lives in Istanbul with her husband Burç Sahinoglu.