At Home in the World: New Directions in Writing from the Asia Pacific

Admission is free.

From South Asian Kenyans struggling under the threat of expulsion to Samoan girls on the cusp of womanhood to a word-obsessed, multiracial Aussie piecing together his family’s past through fragments of letters and half-forgotten stories, the characters found in Kaya Press books are as provocative and nuanced as the writers who give them voice. Celebrate the arrival of Kaya Press at USC with readings and conversations with award-winning authors Brian Castro (Australia), Sia Figiel (Samoa) and Shailja Patel (Kenya). Performance meets poetry meets experimental fiction in this exploration of the creative forces behind the next wave of cutting-edge transnational literature from the Asian and Pacific Island diasporas.

Related Event:
A writing workshop with the three authors will take place on Tuesday, April 3, at 12:30 p.m. Participants will have an opportunity to discuss writing techniques, present their own writings for feedback from the authors and get guidance on the process of publishing their work. Lunch will be served.

Speaker Bios:

Brian Castro was born in Hong Kong in 1950 of Portuguese, Chinese and English parents, and arrived in Australia in 1961. His novels include Birds of Passage (1983), which shared the Australian/Vogel Literary Award; Double-Wolf (1991), winner of the Age Fiction Prize and the Victorian Premier’s Award for Fiction; After China (1992), which also won the Victorian Premier’s Award; and Stepper (1997), for which he received the National Book Council Banjo Award. Shanghai Dancing (republished by Kaya Press in the United States) won the Christina Stead Fiction Prize and the New South Wales Premier’s Book of the Year Award. His books have been translated into German and French. He is currently the chair of creative writing at the University of Adelaide.

Sia Figiel was born in Matautu Tai, Samoa, and grew up amidst traditional Samoan singing and poetry, which heavily influenced her writing. Author of novels, plays and poetry, she has traveled extensively in Europe and the Pacific Islands and has had residencies at the University of Technology in Sydney, the East-West Center in Hawaii, the Pacific Writing Forum at the University of the South Pacific in Fiji and Logoipulotu College in Savaii. Her poetry won the Polynesian Literary Competition in 1994, and her first novel, Where We Once Belonged, was awarded the 1997 Commonwealth Writer’s Prize for Fiction, South East Asia/South Pacific region. Her work has been translated into French, German, Catalan, Danish, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish and Portuguese.

Shailja Patel was born and raised in Kenya, has lived in London and San Francisco, and now divides her time between Nairobi and Berkeley. She honed her poetic skills in performances that have received standing ovations throughout Europe, Africa and North America. She has been described by the Gulf Times as “the poetic equivalent of Arundhati Roy” and by CNN as “the face of globalization as a people-centered phenomenon of migration and exchange.” She has appeared on the BBC World Service, NPR and Al Jazeera, and her poems have been translated into twelve languages. She is a recipient of a Sundance Theatre Fellowship, the Fanny-Ann Eddy Poetry Award from IRNAfrica, the Voices of Our Nations Poetry Award, a Lambda Slam Championship and the Outwrite Poetry Prize.

Organized by Viet Nguyen (English and American Studies and Ethnicity), Sumun Pendakur (Asian Pacific American Student Services) and Sunyoung Lee (Kaya Press).

For further information on this event:
visionsandvoices@usc.edu

Location: Edward L. Doheny Jr. Memorial Library (DML) - Friends Lecture Hall, Room 240

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Daria Yudacufski