On Wednesday May 3, Filip Springer, author of History of a Disappearance, will join Claire Vaye Watkins, Mohammad Saba'aneh, and Natalie Diaz for a PEN World Voices panel entitled "Water as Weapon" at New York City's American Indian Community House. Moderated by Zaha Hassan.
From Standing Rock to the Niger Delta to Gaza, access to clean, safe water is at the center of conflicts that will shape the world’s future. A conversation with Native American writer Natalie Diaz, Polish Journalist and historian Filip Springer, U.S. novelist Claire Vaye Watkins and more to be announced.
Claire Vaye Watkins is the author of Battleborn and Gold Flame Citrus, and a National Book Foundation “5 Under 35” fiction writer, as well as the recipient of the Story Prize, the American Academy of Arts and Letters’s Rosenthal Family Foundation Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship, among many other honors. Her stories and essays have appeared in Granta, One Story, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Glimmer Train, Best of the West 2011, Best of the Southwest 2013, and elsewhere. An assistant professor at the University of Michigan, Watkins has also taught at Bucknell and Princeton, and she and her husband, the writer Derek Palacio, are codirectors of the Mojave School, a creative writing workshop for teenagers in rural Nevada.
Mohammad Saba’aneh is a Palestinian cartoonist whose first book, White And Black: Political Cartoons from Palestine launches May 2, 2017. A former political prisoner, his powerful images portray the pain of Palestinians amid walls, imprisonment, and the theft of their homeland.
Natalie Diaz, a member of the Mojave and Pima Indian tribes, attended Old Dominion University on a full athletic scholarship. After playing professional basketball in Austria, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, and Turkey she returned to ODU for an MFA in writing. Her publications include Prairie Schooner, Iowa Review, Crab Orchard Review, among others. Her work was selected by Natasha Trethewey for Best New Poets and she has received the Nimrod/Hardman Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry. She lives in Surprise, Arizona.
This event is co-presented by the Polish Cultural Institute New York.
When: Wednesday May 3, 7:00 pm – 8:30 pm
Where: American Indian Community House, 39 Eldridge Street, New York, NY 10002
By Filip Springer
Translated from the Polish by Sean Gasper Bye
Winner of Asymptote Journal’s 2016 Close Approximations Translation Contest and Shortlisted for the Ryszard Kapuściński Prize, History of a Disappearance is the fascinating true story of a small mining town in the southwest of Poland that, after seven centuries of history, disappeared.
Paperback • ISBN: 9781632061157
Publication date: Apr 4, 2017