Elsewheres: Migration and Narration

Join us for a conversation with Aleksandar Hemon and Velibor Božović.

Aleksandar Hemon is the author of the novels The World and All That It Holds, which won the 2023 Grand Prix de Litterature Americaine in France; and The Lazarus Project, which was a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award. His three collections of short stories include The Question of Bruno; Nowhere Man, which was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; and Love and Obstacles. His other works include two books of nonfiction, My Parents: An Introduction and The Book of My Lives; the novel The Making of Zombie Wars, journalism, screenplays, and content for the Netflix original show Sense8. His works have been published in Norway, Italy, Germany, France, Japan, and Slovenia, among others.

Born in Sarajevo, Hemon visited Chicago in 1992, intending to stay for a matter of months. While he was there, Sarajevo came under siege, and he was unable to return home. Hemon wrote his first story in English in 1995. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2003 and a “genius grant” from the MacArthur Foundation in 2004. He produces music and videos and DJs as Cielo Hemon. He teaches at Princeton University.

Velibor Božović grew up in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina. When he was in his twenties, the country of his youth became a war zone, and he spent the duration of the siege of Sarajevo honing his survival skills. In 1999, Božović moved to Montreal where, for eight years, he worked as an engineer in aerospace industry until he gave up his engineering career to fully dedicate himself to his art practice.

His work explores how images and sound shape memory, particularly in the space where the historical, the fictional, and the personal intersect. Recent exhibitions at KRAK Center for Contemporary Culture (Bihać), Manifesto Gallery / Kuma International (Sarajevo), and Art Windsor-Essex (Windsor, Ontario) have included iterations of Radio Elsewheres, an online and terrestrial low-power digital radio art project that Božović founded in 2023, exploring the displacement—whether voluntary or forced—of human and non-human bodies, languages, ideas, recipes, musical tuning systems, stories, and more.

Božović’s work has been exhibited in Canada and internationally. His projects have received support from the Canada Council for the Arts and the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec (CALQ). In 2015, he was awarded the Claudine and Stephen Bronfman Fellowship in Contemporary Art.

He currently teaches at Concordia University in Montreal, where he earned a Master of Fine Arts degree in Studio Arts.

Website: veliborbozovic.com

Moderator Stacy Mattingly (MFA, Boston University) is a writer based in the Boston area and coauthor of the New York Times bestseller Unlikely Angel, now a feature film, Captive. She served as a 2024-25 Fulbright U.S. Scholar to Bosnia and Herzegovina, where she has partnered with writers for more than a decade, joining the University of Sarajevo’s Faculty of Philosophy to develop a creative writing workshop and public conversation series. She has offered workshops and masterclasses at several other Bosnian universities and venues, as well as for the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation and the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program. She teaches in the CAS Writing Program at Boston University and at Berklee College of Music.