F183. Writing Violence: Tracing Disaster in Ethnic-American Writing

Room 410, LA Convention Center, Meeting Room Level
Friday, April 1, 2016
12:00 pm to 1:15 pm

 

This panel represents a wide array of “Americanness” as Palestinian American, Canadian Indian, Mexican American, Pakistani American, and African American writers. These writers discuss how their individual and collective communal violent histories are integral to their identity as writers and to their writing. They attempt to explore questions such as how and why they write violence onto the page, and how each writer contributes to contemporary American literary debates.


Participants

Moderator:

Sobia Khan is English and creative writing faculty at Richland College. She earned her PhD in 2014 from UT Dallas. She has published translations of Urdu poetry and short stories on American Muslim experience. Her first novel is almost complete. She is a VONA/Voices almuni in fiction with Junot Diaz.

Phinder Dulai lives in British Columbia, Canada and is the author of the critically acclaimed book of poems dream / arteries and two previous books of poetry: Ragas from the Periphery and Basmati Brown. His most recent work has been published in Canadian Literature and Cue Boo.

Octavio Quintanilla is an assistant professor of literature and creative writing at Our Lady of the Lake University in San Antonio, TX. He is the author of the poetry collection, If I Go Missing.

LaToya Watkins received a PhD from the University of Texas at Dallas and teaches in Dallas. Her fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in publications such as Passages North, the Potomac Review, and The Pushcart Prize: Best of Small Presses 2015.

Randa Jarrar is the author of the critically acclaimed novel A Map of Home and the forthcoming story collection Him, Me, Muhammad Ali. Her work has appeared in Guernica, the Oxford American, the New York Times Magazine, the Utne Reader, & Salon. She is assistant professor at Fresno State.

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