View fullsize

On Sunday March 19, Deepak Unnikrishnan, author of Temporary People and winner of the inaugural Prize for New Immigrant Writing, will appear at Los Angeles's Skylight Bookstore for an event with poet/translator/publisher David Shook.

Temporary People takes on the humanitarian crisis of the so-called "guest workers" of the Persian Gulf with visionary flair; a starred review in Kirkus hails it as "an enchanting, unparalleled anthem of displacement and repatriation," and author Alexandra Kleeman calls it "a book of Ovidian metamorphoses for our precarious time."

Deepak Unnikrishnan is a writer from Abu Dhabi and a resident of the States, who has lived in Teaneck, New Jersey, Brooklyn, New York and Chicago, Illinois. He has studied and taught at the Art Institute of Chicago and presently teaches at New York University Abu Dhabi. Temporary People, his first book, was the inaugural winner of the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing.

David Shook is a poet, translator, and founder of Los Angeles-based nonprofit publishing house Phoneme Media. A graduate of the University of Oklahoma and the University of Oxford, Shook has performed his poetry in dozens of countries, from the Bangla Academy in Dhaka, Bangladesh to London’s Southbank, South by Southwest to PEN Haiti. His writing has appeared in Ambit, the Daily Beast, the Guardian, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Poetry, Poetry Review, and World Literature Today, among many other publications.

When: Sunday, March 19, 5:00 pm

Where: Skylight Bookstore, 1818 N Vermont Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90027