S114. Crossing Genres, Crossing Seas: Writing the South Asian Diaspora

Room 406 AB, LA Convention Center, Meeting Room Level
Saturday, April 2, 2016
9:00 am to 10:15 am

 

Emerging writers who work in fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and hybrid text read and discuss how they map the imaginary of South Asia in diaspora. They explore the complexities of South Asian diasporic identities as a series of cultural, poetic, and ethnic negotiations. They consider also how literature allows us to grapple with identity through strained, distant, and intimate relationships with the subcontinent from Honolulu to LA to New York.


Participants

Moderator:

Rajiv Mohabir, winner of the Four Way Books Intro Prize 2014 and the AWP Intro Journal Award 2015, is a Kundiman and VONA fellow. He received his MFA in poetry and literary translation from Queens College, CUNY. He is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Hawai'i, Manoa.

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’ Chinatown.

Faizal Deen was born in Georgetown, Guyana in 1968 and lives in Ottawa, Canada. He is the author of Land Without Chocolate, a memoir, shortlisted for the A.M. Klein Prize in Poetry from the Quebec Writer's Federation in 2000.

Neelanjana Banerjee is the managing editor of Kaya Press. Her fiction, poetry, and essays have been published in Prairie Schooner, PANK, the Rumpus, World Literature Today, and several anthologies. She is the coeditor of Indivisible, the first ever South Asian American poetry anthology.

Anjoli Roy is a PhD student at UHMānoa and a 2014 J. Watumull Scholarship for the Study of India recipient. She is invested in telling the stories of her family, particularly her paternal great grandfather and freedom fighter, Kali Nath Roy. Kweli, Spiral Orb, and Slink Chunk Press published her recent work.

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