PEN Out Loud: Viet Thanh Nguyen and Maaza Mengiste

Friday, April 26, 2019 | 7:00 pm – 9:00 pm
Strand Book Store828 BROADWAY (& 12TH STREET), NEW YORK, NY 10003

QC’s own Maaza Mengiste is taking part in PEN Out Loud, a year-round series presented by PEN America and the Strand Book Store that amplifies diverse voices and convenes vital conversations on the issues of the day with authors, poets, journalists, and activists. She’ll be in conversation with author Viet Thanh Nguyen discussing the critically acclaimed anthology The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives which collects the work of 17 refugee writers, painting intimate narratives of their everyday lives and reckoning with the largest refugee crisis in history, and the increasingly hostile conditions refugees face.

You find out more about the event below:

https://pen.org/event/pen-out-loud-viet-thanh-nguyen-maaza-mengiste/

———————

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen (The Sympathizer) and author Maaza Mengiste (Beneath the Lion’s Gaze) discuss the critically acclaimed anthology The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives. Edited by Viet Thanh Nguyen and featuring an essay by Maaza Mengiste, The Displaced collects the work of 17 refugee writers, painting intimate narratives of their everyday lives and reckoning with the largest refugee crisis in history, and the increasingly hostile conditions refugees face.

Viet Thanh Nguyen was born in Vietnam in 1971. After the fall of Saigon in 1975, he and his family fled to the United States. The author of three books including The Sympathizer, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and a recently published story collection, The Refugees, Nguyen is the Aerol Arnold Chair of English and Professor of English and American Studies and Ethnicity at University of Southern California. He lives in Los Angeles.

Maaza Mengiste‘s debut novel, Beneath the Lion’s Gaze, was selected by The Guardian as one of the 10 best contemporary African books and named one of the best books of 2010 by Christian Science Monitor, Boston Globe, and other publications. A recipient of a 2018 fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, she is also a Fulbright Scholar, a Puterbaugh Fellow, and a runner-up for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. Her work can be found in The New Yorker, New York Review of Books, Granta, The Guardian, The New York Times, Rolling Stone, and BBC, among other places. She was a writer on the documentary projects, Girl Rising and The Invisible City: Kakuma. Her second novel, The Shadow King, will be published in late 2019. Author photo credit Simon Hurst.