Wednesday, August 19, 2015

Oct 3 2015 - Save the Date! South Asian Writer's Festival

Fall for the Book & The Writer's Center Bethesda

October 3, 2015 @ 2:00 pm – 3:30 pm

Saturday, October 3, The Writer’s Center in Bethesda, MD, will host the panel, “The Cities We Live In: New Writings from South Asia” as part of Fall for the Book. Moderator Leeya Mehta will speak with authors Kavita Daiya, Tula Goenke, and Rashmi Sadana about their ongoing projects and research. Join them starting at 2 p.m. for an afternoon of illuminating conversation.

Kavita Daiya
Kavita Daiya
Kavita Daiya is Associate Professor of English and Affiliated Faculty in the Women’s Studies Program and Global Women’s Institute at George Washington University, Washington, D.C. She directs a Digital Humanities Histories of Violence and Migration initiative www.1947Partition.org and serves as Associate Editor of the South Asian Review. She has written numerous articles on modern British and postcolonial literature, gender studies, Asian American literature, and transnational cinema, and a book, Violent Belongings: Partition, Gender and National Culture in Colonial India (Philadelphia: Temple UP, [2008] 2011; New Delhi: Yoda Press, 2013).  Her scholarship dwells on violence and migration in literature and film; in its sustained commitment to how gender and sexuality shape the narratives of ethnicity, migration and rights she work on, her scholarship also contributes to debates in Gender and Sexuality Studies.  She is currently working on her second book Peripheral Secularisms.

Tula Goenka
Tula Goenka
Tula Goenka is an author, filmmaker, educator and human rights activist. With three decades of experience in the film and television industry, she has worked as a film editor with top filmmakers including Mira Nair, Spike Lee and James Ivory. She now produces and edits her own documentaries. A tenured professor at S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University, she teaches courses in film production and Indian cinema, and routinely accompanies her students on month-long internships in Bombay. Her book, Not Just Bollywood: Indian Directors Speak was published in 2014 and is a series of conversations with 28 top directors from across the spectrum of Indian cinema. She is the founding director of the annual Syracuse University Human Rights Film Festival, now in its 13th year. Born and raised in India, Goenka is a cancer survivor and lives in Syracuse, New York, with her two children. More information on her book is here.

Rashmi Sadana
Rashmi Sadana
Rashmi Sadana is the author of English Heart, Hindi Heartland: The Political Life of Literature in India (University of California Press, 2012), which is an ethnography of Delhi’s literary field and the politics of language that undergird it. She is currently writing a book about urban space and forms of gendered sociality as seen through the prism of Delhi’s new metro system. She writes a regular column for the Mumbai-based newspaper, DNA, and has published essays in Public Culture, The CaravanPublic Books, InterventionsEconomic and Political Weekly, and elsewhere. She is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at George Mason University.

Leeya Mehta

Leeya Mehta_100315
Leeya Mehta
Leeya Mehta has worked in international development for two decades, most recently with the World Bank’s gender group. She was a fellow at the UN University in Tokyo on human rights. She is the author of a chapbook, The Towers of Silence and was nominated for a 2016 Pushcart Prize for her poem, “The Abduction,” on identity and nationalism in contemporary India.

Fiction from South Asia: A Conversation with novelists A.X. Ahmad and Sujata Massey

October 3, 2015 @ 3:45 pm – 5:15 pm

A.X. Ahmad

re_ax_ahmadAmin Ahmad, as ‘A.X. Ahmad’, is the author of two books—The Caretaker (2013 ) and The Last Taxi Ride (2014), both suspense novels from St. Martin’s Press. He is currently working on a literary novel. His short stories and essays have been published in many literary magazines and listed in Best American Essays. Ahmad was educated at Vassar College and M.I.T. He has studied writing at NYU, The New School, and Grubstreet. He has taught The Master Novel and Advanced Novel classes at The Writer’s Center for the last three years. More about him at: axahmad.com.

Sujata Massey

Sujata Massey (2)
Sujata Massey

Sujata Massey was born in England to parents from India and Germany. She grew up mostly in the United States, graduated from the Johns Hopkins University, and worked as a newspaper journalist in Baltimore before turning to fiction. She’s recently written two historical novels about British colonial India, but before that came an 11-book mystery series set in modern Japan. Her books are published in sixteen countries and have won the Agatha and Macavity awards and been finalists for the Edgar, Anthony, and Mary Higgins Clark prizes. Sujata specializes in writing stories of family life and setting them against real life historical events. In her novel The Sleeping Dictionary, a young, illiterate girl who is pigeonholed as a maid rises to become a sophisticated woman of letters, and undercover spy for the freedom movement in 1930s Calcutta.