Laura Ahearn- Haiku Competition Coordinator
Laura Ahearn is Turtle Light Press’s website manager and bookkeeper — not to mention the one who coordinates the biennial chapbook competition and keeps Rick, her husband, on an even keel.
She is also a linguistic and cultural anthropologist at Rutgers University who works on issues of gender, kinship, and marriage in Nepal. Her first book, Invitations to Love: Literacy, Love Letters, and Social Change in Nepal (University of Michigan Press, 2001), is about the courtship practice of love letter writing in the Magar village where she was a Peace Corps volunteer for several years in the early 1980′s.
She is interested in agency, constraints on meaning in Nepali women’s songfests, and the changing meanings and values surrounding childbirth in Nepal.
Currently, she is serving as a program director in the cultural anthropology program at the National Science Foundation while on leave from Rutgers University. Her linguistic anthropology textbook, Living Language, just came out from Blackwell in Spring 2011. Read more about Laura Ahearn’s research.
