“She told me things about my grandfather: that when he didn’t brush his teeth, they turned green with algae instead of yellow with plaque, and that if she’d let him, “He would grow scales the way most men grew beards.”
alien (adj.)
c. 1300, "strange, foreign," from Old French alien "strange, foreign;" as a noun, "an alien, stranger, foreigner," from Latin alienus "of or belonging to another, not one's own, foreign, strange," also, as a noun, "a stranger, foreigner," adjective from alius (adv.) "another, other, different" (from PIE root *al- (1) "beyond").
Proto-Indo-European root meaning "beyond."
Zeynep Özakat was born and raised in Istanbul, Turkey, but resides in the U.S. as an “alien of extraordinary ability.”
She is a graduate of NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study where she studied philosophy as a way to get to “the meaning of life.” She has since gained some more humility, but still holds a BA degree in “Narrating the Self”—which she always appropriately prefaces with an apology when someone asks her what her major was. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing from Syracuse University where she received The Shirley Jackson Prize in Fiction, The Leonard Brown Prize in Poetry, and a Graduate Dean’s Award for Excellence in Research and Creative Work.
Her writing has appeared in Glimmer Train Stories, where she won the Fiction Open Contest, in Black Warrior Review, in Gulf Coast Online and most recently in Michigan Quarterly Review. She has received support and scholarships from The Disquiet Conference in Lisbon, The Juniper Summer Writing Institute, The Bread Loaf Environmental Writing Conference, and The Fine Arts Center in Provincetown where she was a 2021-2022 Writing Fellow.
Zeynep has taught English Literature and Creative Writing at Syracuse University and runs her own editing and tutoring business. She is currently working on a collection of stories and a novel.