Author of 'There Was and There Was Not: A Journey Through Hate and Possibility in Turkey, Armenia and Beyond'

Meline Toumani is a freelance writer based in New York City and the author of There Was and There Was Not: A Journey Through Hate and Possibility in Turkey, Armenia and Beyond. She has written about politics, ideas, books, and music for the New York Times Sunday Magazine and culture pages, The Nation, n+1, Salon, The Boston Globe, GlobalPost, The National, and Travel + Leisure. As a foreign reporter, she has worked in Turkey, Armenia, Georgia and Russia.

In 2002 and 2003, she was the coordinator of the Russian American Journalism Institute in Rostov-on-Don, Russia, and in 2007 she and was a journalism fellow in residence at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna.

Her work has been anthologized in Istanbul: The Collected Traveler, and included in The New York Times Presents Smarter by Sunday: 52 Weekends of Essential Knowledge for the Curious Mind. She has been an invited speaker in academic and private settings, and a commentator for The Wall Street Journal Online, Deutsche Welle Radio, Russia Today and Pacifica Radio. In addition to her freelance work, she has held staff editorial positions at the New York Times Magazine, KQED Public Media, and GreatSchools.

Toumani graduated from the University of California, Berkeley with high honors in English and public policy, and holds a master's degree in journalism from the Cultural Reporting and Criticism Program at NYU.