Library, Ithaca City of Asylum to Present Local Panel on the Role of Place and Displacement in Literature

Tompkins County Public Library and the Ithaca City of Asylum (ICOA) will partner for “Voices of Freedom 2015,” a moderated panel discussion on the importance of place and displacement in literature, Thursday, November 19 at 7 p.m. in the Library’s BorgWarner Community Room.

Novelist and essayist Edward Hower will moderate a distinguished panel of local authors, including Raza Ahmad Rumi, Gabriel Urza, Valzhyna Mort and Ishion Hutchinson.

Rumi, ICOA’s sixth writer in residence, joined the Ithaca College faculty as a Visiting International Scholar in Residence this fall.  A policy analyst, journalist and author from Pakistan, Rumi has become a leading public voice against extremism and human rights violations. In March, 2014 he was the target of an assassination attempt—which killed his driver—by a militia linked to the Taliban. Rumi’s travelogue, “Delhi by Heart:  Impressions of a Pakistani Traveller,” was published  in 2013 by Harper Collins.

Urza, an assistant professor at Ithaca College, has family roots in the Basque country, which is the setting for his novel about the Basque independence movement, “All That Followed.” Before joining the Ithaca College faculty, he spent several years as a public defender in Reno, Nevada.

Mort is a poet born in Minsk, Belarus in its last decade under Soviet rule. The New Yorker describes her as someone who “strives to be an envoy for her native country, writing with almost alarming vociferousness about the struggle to establish a clear identity for Belarus and its language.” She has received the Lannan Foundation Literary Fellowship, the Bess Hokin Prize from Poetry Magazine, and the Burda Prize for Eastern European authors, and is currently a visiting assistant professor at Cornell University.

Hutchinson, an assistant professor and the Meringoff Sesquicentennial Faculty Fellow in the Department of English at Cornell University, was born in Port Antonio, Jamaica. His poetry has been widely published and has won numerous awards, including the 2011 PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award, the 2013 Whiting Award, and the 2011 Academy of American Poets Larry Levis Prize.

The program will begin with a short reading by Rumi and will conclude with an opportunity to meet the writers during a free reception.

For more information, contact Carrie Wheeler-Carmenatty at (607) 272-4557 extension 248 or cwheeler@tcpl.org.  To learn more about City of Asylum programs, visit ithacacityofasylum.wordpress.com.

Voices of Freedom is made possible with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA), celebrating 50 years of building strong, creative communities in New York State's 62 counties. The GAP grant is part of NYSCA's Decentralization program, along with the Artist in Community Grant and the Arts Education grant. The Decentralization program is administered in Tompkins County by the Community Arts Partnership.