Gretchen McCullough | Author | Educator (Audio)

The Kino Isaac Podcast

I sat down with author and translator, Gretchen McCullough. Raised in Harlingen, Texas, Gretchen’s journey has been nothing short of extraordinary. After graduating from Brown University in 1984, she embarked on a life of teaching and storytelling, with experiences spanning Egypt, Turkey, and Japan. She has earned her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Alabama and was awarded a teaching Fulbright to Syria from 1997-1999. Gretchen’s work is a celebration of cultures and stories. Her essays, stories, and reviews have been featured in publications like The Barcelona Review, Guernica, The Common, The Millions, and NPR. As a translator, her collaborations with Mohamed Metwalli have brought English and Arabic stories to life in platforms such as World Literature Today, Nizwa, Banipal, and Brooklyn Rail in Translation. Together, they published Three Stories from Cairo in 2011 and A Song by the Aegean Sea in 2022. In this conversation, we explore her most recent work, Shahrazad’s Gift (2024): Shahrazad’s Gift is a collection of linked short stories, set in an apartment building in contemporary Cairo, with a melange of flamboyant, unlikely characters, Egyptian and expatriate, who seem to have stepped out of A Thousand and One Nights.