F204.
Languages of Belonging: Transcending Borders in Life and on the Page
Friday, March 10, 2023
1:45 pm to 3:00 pm
Five women writers of color incorporate personal and global histories—of India, Pakistan, and the Netherlands, and within the U.S., California, Louisiana, and the Texas-Mexico border—into their prose, poetry, and hybrid texts. Each writer will discuss her process of transcending literal and figurative borders separating nations, generations, and identities. How do we resolve the conflicts that arise from having histories in multiple places? Where are we traveling from and to in our writing?
Participants
Sehba Sarwar is a novelist (Black Wings, Veliz Books 2019) whose writings tackle gender and displacement issues. Her short stories have been anthologized by Feminist Press, Akashic Books, and Harper Collings India, and her essays have appeared in the New York Times, Callaloo, LA Times, and elsewhere.
Torsa Ghosal is the author of an experimental novella, Open Couplets, and a book of literary criticism, Out of Mind. Her work has appeared in Berkeley Fiction Review, Catapult, Lit Hub, LARB, and elsewhere. She is a professor of English at California State University and is at work on a novel.
Emmy Pérez, USA Fellow 2022, is the author of With the River on Our Face, Solstice, and a forthcoming volume of new and selected poetry. A past recipient of a Poets Laureate Fellowship and an NEA fellowship, she cofounded Poets Against Walls and is a professor at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley.
Tameka Cage Conley, PhD, is a graduate of the fiction program of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and 2018–19 recipient of the Provost Visiting Writer Fellowship at the University of Iowa. Her work is published or forthcoming in Ploughshares, VQR, Callaloo, African American Review, and elsewhere.
Gemini Wahhaj
