F170. Don't You Say a Word: Censorship and Its Silencing

F150, Oregon Convention Center, Level 1
Friday, March 29, 2019
10:30 am to 11:45 am

 

Censorship today is not exclusive to authoritarian countries, but is rather a global phenomenon. In this panel we examine the history and variety of censorship, the trauma of silencing on writers, translators, readers, and societies. We shed light on how censorship contributes to the invisibility of literary and creative voices of certain cultures from the international stage, and we explore various modes of resistance toward freedom of expression and more equitable exchange of cultures.


Participants

Moderator:

Niloufar Talebi is a writer, award-winning translator, and multidisciplinary artist. Projects include: BelongingVis & IICARUS/RISEPersian Rite of SpringFire AngelsEpiphanyPlentiful Peach, and The Investment. Her work is commissioned by Carnegie Hall, Cal Performances, BAM, Stanford, and Kennedy Center.

Carolyn Forché’s books of poetry include Blue HourThe Angel of History, which received the Los Angeles Times Book Award; and The Country Between Us. She is also the editor of Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness and the coeditor of Poetry of Witness: The Tradition in English 1500-2001. Her honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. She is the Director of the Lannan Center for Poetry and Poetics and holds the Lannan Chair in Poetry at Georgetown University in Washington, DC.

Chris Abani's recent books are The Secret History of Las VegasThe Face: A Memoir and Sanctificum. Honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, the PEN/Hemingway Award, an Edgar Prize, a Ford USA Artists Fellowship, and the PEN Beyond the Margins Award. He is Professor of English at Northwestern University.

Glen Retief's The Jack Bank: A Memoir of a South African Childhood won a Lambda Literary Award. He teaches creative nonfiction at Susquehanna University, where he also directs the undergraduate creative writing major.

Raad Rahman is a writer, journalist, and human rights advocate whose writing includes topics of literature, modern Islam, child rights and reportage on counterterrorism in South Asia. 

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