Creator
Sharon May
American writer, editor and photographer who edited two anthologies of Cambodian writing for Manoa.
Sharon May is an American writer, editor and photographer who edited two anthologies of Cambodian writing for the journal Mānoa.[1][2] Her work with Cambodian writers grew out of the years she spent in the refugee camps on the Thai-Cambodian border in the 1980s.[2]
Career
As a university student, May went to the Khao-I-Dang refugee camp on a photojournalist pass, planning to stay for three weeks. She stayed for one or two years, teaching English, recording interviews and working with musicians, and she photographed the Cambodian refugee camps in 1985.[2] She began writing at about six years old and became more serious about it after she came back from the camps. At that time Americans could not travel inside Cambodia, and she returned to the country later.[2]
May lived and worked in Cambodia while she researched the Khmer Rouge regime for Columbia University's Center for the Study of Human Rights.[1][3] Around 2000 she earned an MFA in creative writing in California, and she then held a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in fiction at Stanford University.[2][3]
Anthologies
In the Shadow of Angkor: Contemporary Writing from Cambodia, which May edited with Frank Stewart, was published by Mānoa and the University of Hawaii Press in 2004.[1][4] It gathers work by some of the people she had met on her travels. The book spans Cambodian writing from before the war to about 2000, by men and women and by older and younger writers, in short stories, poetry, film scripts and rap lyrics, including lyrics by the Cambodian rapper Prach Ly. May also included her own interviews with Cambodian writers.[2] The title came out of a brainstorming session between May and Bhavia Wagner.[5]
In December 2016 May was in Cambodia looking for writers for a new, expanded version of the book, with more classic Cambodian literature and writing up to the present day.[2] That work became Out of the Shadows of Angkor: Cambodian Poetry, Prose, and Performance through the Ages (2022). May brought together four fellow guest editors, Christophe Macquet, Trent Walker, Phina So and Rinith Taing, and the team worked for more than a decade to complete it.[1][5] May wrote the volume's overview essay.[6] She is credited with Khun Srun and Christophe Macquet on "A Small Request," one of the pieces in the book.[3]
The collection brings together the work of 33 authors across fourteen centuries of Cambodian history. Their poems, stories, novels and essays are set beside anonymous texts from the seventh century to the present, including inscriptions, chants, songs, epics, folk tales and theater. The closing section on performance includes an extended interview with the bard Kong Nay.[5] It includes writing by Cambodian refugees and members of the diaspora in Australia, the United States, Canada and Europe, along with visual art, including paintings by Theanly Chov and excerpts from a graphic novel by Tian Veasna.[6] The editors say the anthology sets out to make more Cambodian literature available in English.[4]
Photography
May photographed the performing arts work of Van Savay, a former dancer of the royal ballet. Her black and white photographs were part of the Cambodia Peace Gallery's planned exhibition Reconciliation through the Arts, which the gallery developed with May and Phare Ponleu Selpak. The exhibition looks at the links between Khmer arts, creative expression, healing of identity and hope for the future.[7]
Works
- Out of the Shadows of Angkor (Book)
See also
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 UBC Press, Sharon May
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 VOA Khmer, Q&A: Sharon May, Editor and Author of 'In the Shadow of Angkor' (December 8, 2016)
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 University of Hawaiʻi Press, Cambodia (September 7, 2022)
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 University of Hawaiʻi Press, New Mānoa Anthology Offers Unprecedented Collection (September 7, 2022)
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 University of Hawaiʻi Press, Editor Q&A: Celebrating Cambodian Poetry, Prose, and Performance in New Landmark Anthology
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 University of Hawaiʻi Press, Out of the Shadows of Angkor: Cambodian Poetry, Prose, and Performance through the Ages (July 19, 2022)
- ↑ Coalition of Master's Scholars on Material Culture, Cambodian Artistic Resilience (April 23, 2021)