This collection supports and promotes awareness to the important mission and framework of the Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here Coalition's focus on the lasting power of the written word and the arts in support of the free expression of ideas, the preservation of shared cultural spaces, and the importance of responding to attacks, both overt and subtle, on artists, writers, and academics working under oppressive regimes or in zones of conflict, despite the destruction of that literary/cultural content.

Heinz Insu Fenkl is an author, editor, translator, mythic scholar, and the director of the Creative Writing Program at the State University of New York, New Paltz. He is also the director of ISIS: The Interstitial Studies Institute at SUNY, New Paltz. His fiction includes Memories of My Ghost Brother, an autobiographical, Interstitial novel about growing up in Korea as a bi-racial child in the '60s. On the strength of this book he was named a Barnes and Noble 'Great New Writer' and Pen/Hemingway finalist in 1997. His second novel, Shadows Bend (a collaborative work, published under a pseudonym), was an innovative, dark 'road novel' about H.P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, and Clark Ashton Smith. He has also published short fiction in a variety of journals and magazines, as well as numerous articles on folklore and myth, many of which can be found on Endicott Studio for Mythic Arts. Heinz was raised in Korea and (in his later years) Germany and the United States. Graduating from Vassar, he studied folklore and shamanism as a Fulbright Scholar in Korea and dream research under a grant from the University of California. Before his appointment to his current position at SUNY, he taught a range of courses at Vassar, Bard, Sarah Lawrence, and Yonsei University (Korea), including Asian/American Folk Traditions, East Asian Folklore, Korean Literature, Asian American Literature, and Native American Literature, in addition to Creative Writing. He has published translations of Korean fiction and folklore, and is co-editor of Kori: The Beacon Anthology of Korean American Literature. Currently he is at work on a sequel to Memories of My Ghost Brother, and on a volume of Korean myths, legends, and folk tales: Old, Old Days When Tigers Smoked Tobacco Pipes. He also writes regular columns on mythic topics for Realms of Fantasy magazine"--The interstitialarts.org website (viewed June 23, 2015).