S162. Remapping Displacement: Women Writers from LA Redefine "Home"

Room 512, LA Convention Center, Meeting Room Level
Saturday, April 2, 2016
10:30 am to 11:45 am

 

Writers of Armenian, Sri Lankan, African, and Philippine diasporas discuss how their Los Angeles upbringing has impacted their craft and narrative of home/displacement—home as a person and/or a place, a longing, a genesis, and a journey; displacement as genocide, war, sexual/child abuse, and inherited/generational trauma. How have the multicultural/diverse communities of their youth invaded their fictions? How do the traces of loss affect the reimaginations of Los Angeles in their work?


Participants

Moderator:

Melissa R. Sipin won Glimmer Train's Fiction Open and coedited Kuwento: Lost Things, an anthology on new Philippine myths. Her work is in Glimmer Train, Guernica, and Washington Square Review, among others. She cofounded TAYO Literary Magazine.

Nayomi Munaweera's debut novel, Island of a Thousand Mirrors, won the 2013 Commonwealth Prize for Asia. The New York Times called it "incandescent" and Publishers Weekly has compared her voice to that of Michael Ondatjee and Jumpha Lahiri. Munaweera's second novel is forthcoming.

Rae Paris is a NEA Fellow whose work appears in Guernica, Hobart Pulp, Feminist Studies, and other journals. She writes mostly in East Lansing, Michigan where she is assistant professor of creative writing at Michigan State University.

Melissa Chadburn has written for Buzzfeed, Poets & Writers, Al Jazeera America, and dozens other places. Her essay, “The Throwaways,” received notable mention in Best American Essays and Best American Nonrequired Reading. Her first novel, A Tiny Upward Shove, is forthcoming.

Micheline Aharonian Marcom was born in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia and raised in Los Angeles. She has published five novels, including a trilogy of books about the Armenian genocide and its aftermath in the 20th century.

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