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Come to SubCulture Theater at 8:30 PM on Saturday, May 11th to hear Grace Talusan, winner of the Restless Books 2017 New Immigrant Writing Prize, give her stunning and deeply personal testimony of sexual abuse. Grace will read from her memoir, The Body Papers, alongside seven other writers from around the world: Paul Tran, Edouard Louis, Shiori Ito, Romeo Oriogun, Scholastique Mukasonga, and Pajtim Statovci.

The event will take place at SubCulture Theater on Bleecker St as part of the PEN World Voices Festival from May 6th-12th.

The Body Papers is the striking memoir of Grace Talusan, a woman from the Philippines whose family immigrated to New England when she was a child in the 70s. At school, the young Grace confronts racism as one of the few kids with a brown face. At home, the confusion is worse: her grandfather’s nightly visits to her room leave her hurt and terrified, and she learns to build a protective wall of silence that that will affect all her relationships, her mental health, and her relationship with her own body. In excavating such abuse and trauma, and supplementing her story with government documents, medical records, and family photos, Talusan gives voice to unspeakable experience, and shines a light of hope into the darkness.

Grace Talusan was born in the Philippines and raised in New England. A graduate of Tufts University and the MFA Program in Writing at UC Irvine, she is the recipient of a U.S. Fulbright Fellowship to the Philippines and an Artist Fellowship Award from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. Talusan teaches the Essay Incubator at GrubStreet and at the Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life at Tufts. She is the Fannie Hurst Writer-in-Residence at Brandeis University for 2019–2021. The Body Papers, winner of the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing, is her first book.