Dr. Marilena Zackheos is a scholar, poet, and music maker. She studied philosophy, creative writing, and English literature in the USA and the UK. She holds a PhD in English from George Washington University, Washington D.C. She has published on postcolonial literary and cultural studies, psychoanalysis and trauma, gender and sexuality. She is co-editor of Vile Women: Female Evil in Fact, Fiction, and Mythology (2014), From Cyprus With Love (2016) and Education in a Multicultural Cyprus (2017). Other work includes an article titled “Revisiting Female Intimacy in Luz María Umpierre-Herrera’s The Margarita Poems” in Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies (2016)  and a co-authored chapter on Nicosia’s emerging queer art scene in Contemporary Art in Cyprus: Politics, Identity and Culture Across Borders (forthcoming, 2018). Her research addresses representations of individual and community island identity in print and non-print texts, investigating specifically the intersections between trauma, gender, sexuality, and the nation. She is currently Assistant Professor of Social Sciences at the University of Nicosia and Director of the Cyprus Center for Intercultural Studies, which cooperates on and develops initiatives addressing diversity locally and abroad. She teaches courses on gender and the media, delivers training sessions on cultural intelligence, and leads creative writing workshops. She is a member of the following non-profits: Write CY, the Association for Historical Dialogue and Research, and Accept-LGBT Cyprus. She is also a member of the Culture and Memory Task Group of the Cyprus Dialogue Forum. Her first poetry collection Carmine Lullabies was published in February 2016. Her music album Oh My was released in March 2017 under the band name Grendel Babies.