S225. Fracturing Memory, Crossing Borders: Transnational Memoir Writers Discuss Hybrid Necessities

Room 202B, Washington Convention Center, Level Two
Saturday, February 11, 2017
1:30 pm to 2:45 pm

 

For transnational writers who spend their lives constantly negotiating borders—geographic and personal—hybridity no longer becomes a choice. This panel features diverse writers whose experimental memoirs include nonlinearity, multiple genres, photographs, and other multimedia. We will discuss how these hybrid strategies succeed or fail when trying to reconstruct family histories or address personal trauma, and how this can be especially challenging when moving between nations and identities.


Participants

Moderator:

Minal Hajratwala's books include Leaving India, winner of 4 nonfiction awards; the poetry collection Bountiful Instructions for Enlightenment; and the anthology Out! Stories from the New Queer India. She cofounded The (Great) Indian Poetry Collective and runs Write Like a Unicorn, an online portal serving writers.

Q.M. Zhang is a writer and teacher of creative nonfiction stories and forms, with a focus on Chinese America. Her book, Accomplice to Memory, combines memoir, fiction, and documentary photographs to explore the limits and possibilities of truth telling across generations and geographies.

Amarnath Ravva is the author of American Canyon. For the past ten years, he has helped run and curate events at Betalevel, a venue for social experimentation and hands-on culture located in Los Angeles’s Chinatown.

Abeer Hoque is a writer and photographer. She has published a monograph of travel photographs and poems, The Long Way Home, a book of linked stories, poems, and photographs, The Lovers and the Leavers, and a memoir, Olive Witch.

Tania De Rozario is a visual artist and writer. She was the winner of the 2011 Golden Point Award for English Poetry and was shortlisted for the 2014 Singapore Literature Prize. She is the author of Tender Delirium (poetry) and And The Walls Come Crumbling Down (poetic memoir).

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