South Asian Writers Resist
Event Information
About this Event
Presented by Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center, in partnership with Los Angeles Poet Society, Tia Chucha Press, & the Tuesday Night Project.
Join South Asian writers at a special reading hosted by Beyond Baroque in which writers respond to urgent global issues including rising walls and closed borders, the Black Lives Matter movement, and immigration rights. The gathering — held eighteen months after the Indian government stripped the province of Kashmir of its special status and just one day after the transfer of power in the US — will create space for writers to forge connections across local and global borders.
Featuring: Tanzila “Taz” Ahmed, Neelanjana Banerjee, Torsa Ghosal, Arshia Haq, Sorayya Khan, Mahmud Rahman, Shreerekha Subramanian. Hosted by Sehba Sarwar.
This event is supported in part by Poets & Writers.
Special thanks to community members and organizations for supporting the reading. Organizations include South Asian Network (SAN), South Asian American Digital Archive (SAADA), Book Swell, Pakistan Arts Council USC, and more.
About the Authors:
Tanzila “Taz” Ahmed (Los Angeles, USA) is a political strategist, storyteller, and artist. She’s turned out over 500,000 Asian American voters, recorded her #GoodMuslimBadMuslim podcast at the White House and makes #MuslimVDay cards annually. Ahmed received an award from President Obama’s White House as a Champion of Change in Art and Storytelling. https://www.tazzystar.me
Neelanjana Banerjee (Los Angeles, USA / Calcutta, India) is the Managing Editor of Kaya Press, and teaches at UCLA and Loyola Marymount University. Her work has appeared in Prairie Schooner, PANK Magazine, Chicago Quarterly Reader, Teen Vogue and elsewhere.
Torsa Ghosal (Sacramento, USA / Calcutta, India) is the author of an experimental novella, Open Couplets (Yoda Press, India). Her short fiction and essays appear in Literary Hub, Himal Southasian, Entropy and elsewhere. Ghosal teaches literature and creative writing at California State University, Sacramento. She tweets @TorsaG.
Arshia Fatima Haq (Los Angeles, USA / Hyderabad, India) works across film, visual art, performance, text, and sound. She is the founder of Discostan, a decolonial performance/club space and record label engaged with the SWANA (South and West Asia and North Africa) region and its diasporas. https://arshiahaq.com
Sorayya Khan (Ithaca, USA / Islamabad, Pakistan) is the author of three novels Noor, Five Queen’s Road, and City of Spies which received the Best International Fiction Book Award, Sharjah International Book Fair, 2015. She was awarded a US Fulbright Research Grant to conduct research in Pakistan and Bangladesh. She is at work on a memoir. www.sorayyakhan.com
Mahmud Rahman (Oakland, USA / Dhaka, Bangladesh) is a writer and translator. His book Killing the Water: Stories (Penguin Books India, 2010) includes stories of migrants and dislocated people, and his second book is a translation of Bangladeshi writer Mahmudul Haque’s novel Black Ice (HarperCollins India, 2012). www.mahmudrahman.com
Shreerekha Subramanian (Houston, USA / New Delhi, India) publishes scholarship across comparative and cultural studies and is the author of Women Writing Violence: The Novel and Radical Feminist Imaginaries (Sage 2012). She teaches literary and philosophical texts at the University of Houston-Clear Lake.
Sehba Sarwar (Los Angeles, USA / Karachi, Pakistan) is the recipient of many literary awards, including the Mid-America Artist Innovation award, and her papers are collected by the University of Houston. She is the author of a novel Black Wings (Veliz Books, 2019) and her essays, poems, and short stories have been published in Canada, India, Pakistan, South Korea, and USA.. https://sehbasarwar.com/