Tune in to hear Azar Nafisi and Joanne Leedom-Ackerman discuss their works! This is a virtual event please register here!
Azar Nafisi is best known as the author of the national bestseller Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, as well as for her other books, That Other World: Nabokov and the Puzzle of Exile, The Republic of Imagination: America in Three Books, and Things I’ve Been Silent About. She has taught and held multiple fellowships at several universities including Johns Hopkins’ School of Advanced International Studies, Georgetown University, and Oxford University. Her work often highlights literature’s incredible ability to connect individuals and elicit empathy. Dr. Nafisi published her most recent book, Read Dangerously: The Subversive Power of Literature During Troubled Times in March 2022.
The New York Times bestselling author of Reading Lolita in Tehran returns with Read Dangerously, a guide to the power of literature in turbulent times, arming readers with a resistance reading list, ranging from James Baldwin to Zora Neale Hurston to Margaret Atwood. What is the role of literature in an era when one political party wages continual war on writers and the press? What is the connection between political strife in our daily lives, and the way we meet our enemies on the page in fiction? How can literature, through its free exchange, affect politics? In this galvanizing guide to literature as resistance, Nafisi seeks to answer these questions. Drawing on her experiences as a woman and voracious reader living in the Islamic Republic of Iran, her life as an immigrant in the United States, and her role as a literature professor in both countries, she crafts an argument for why, in a genuine democracy, we must engage with the enemy, and how literature can be a vehicle for doing so. Structured as a series of letters to her father, who taught her as a child about how literature can rescue us in times of trauma, Nafisi explores the most probing questions of our time through the works of Toni Morrison, Salman Rushdie, James Baldwin, Margaret Atwood, and more.
Joanne Leedom-Ackerman is a novelist, short story writer, and journalist. Her works of fiction include The Dark Path to the River and No Marble Angels, along with stories and essays in collections and anthologies, including Short Stories of the Civil Rights Movement and Remembering Arthur Miller. Her nonfiction book PEN Journeys: Memoir of Literature on the Line was recently published, and she is senior editor for The Journey of Liu Xiaobo: From Dark Horse to Nobel Laureate. Former International Secretary of PEN International, she is a Vice President emeritus of PEN International and former Chair of PEN International’s Writers in Prison Committee. She is past President of PEN Center USA West and has served on the board and as Vice President of PEN American Center and the PEN/Faulkner Foundation. She also serves on the boards of the American Writers Museum, Words Without Borders, the International Center for Journalists, and Refugees International and is an emeritus board member of Poets and Writers and Human Rights Watch, where she served as chair of the Asia Advisory Committee and is a former board member of the International Crisis Group, and Save the Children. She is also an emeritus trustee of Brown University and Johns Hopkins University. A former award-winning reporter for The Christian Science Monitor, Ms. Leedom-Ackerman has taught writing at New York University, City University of New York, Occidental College and in the Writers’ Program at the University of California at Los Angeles extension. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Texas Institute of Letters and is a member of American and English PEN.
PEN Journeys: Memoir of Literature on the Line reflects a time when the world was opening up—the Berlin Wall fell; the Soviet Union broke apart; democracies were ascendant around the globe—and PEN was often at the forefront. In many countries writers like Václav Havel led the way as they were being released from prison. PEN Journeys spans three decades and tracks PEN’s centrality to many of the events, to the individual writers, and to Joanne’s own story as she moved to Europe with nine and eleven-year-old sons who also intersected with this time and with events to come. The period was also a time when this sprawling organization, now with 157 centers in over 100 countries, was finding it needed to reorganize and so had its own revolution.
PEN Journeys is filled with anecdotes of the writers, including those well-known like Salman Rushdie, Orhan Pamuk, Günter Grass, Ken Saro Wiwa, Anna Politkovskaya and others and those less known but courageous writers. Writers set the guardrails for free societies. Their freedom and freedom of expression are vital for a democratic citizenry. PEN, the only literary organization with consultative status at the United Nations, holds watch
About the Moderator:
This discussion will be moderated by Founder and Director of the Cheuse Center, Matthew Davis. Matthew Davis is the founding director of the Alan Cheuse International Writers Center. He’s the author of When Things Get Dark: A Mongolian Winter’s Tale and his work has appeared in the New Yorker, the Atlantic, the LA Review of Books and Guernica, among other places. He has been an Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fellow at New America, a Fellow at the Black Mountain Institute at UNLV, and a Fulbright Fellow to Syria and Jordan.
This event is co-sponsored by the Cheuse Center for International Writers at George Mason University, a cultural diplomatic center that supports international literature and advocates for international writers.