Join us in celebrating Amherst College’s LitFest 2022 with an exciting author talk featuring the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing winners Deepak Unnikrishnan, Grace Talusan, and Ani Gjika in collaboration with The Common. The discussion will be moderated by the Publisher of Restless Books, Ilan Stavans.
This is a free, virtual event. Register here to secure your spot!
When: February 27th at 3pm EST
Where: Online, via Amherst College LitFest
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
Ani Gjika is an Albanian-born poet and translator and the winner of the 2021 Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing in nonfiction for her brilliant, polemical memoir, By Its Right Name, which Restless Books will publish in 2023.
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.
Grace Talusan's first book, The Body Papers, is a New York Times Editors’ Choice selection, winner of the Massachusetts Book Award for Nonfiction, and winner of the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing. She was born in the Philippines and raised in New England. She graduated from 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. She taught writing for many years at Tufts University and Grub Street. Currently, Talusan is the Fannie Hurst Writer-in-Residence at Brandeis University.
Ilan Stavans is the Publisher of Restless Books and the Lewis-Sebring Professor of Humanities, Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College. His books include On Borrowed Words, Spanglish, Dictionary Days, The Disappearance, and A Critic’s Journey. He has edited The Norton Anthology of Latino Literature, the three-volume set Isaac Bashevis Singer: Collected Stories, The Poetry of Pablo Neruda, among dozens of other volumes. He is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, Chile’s Presidential Medal, the International Latino Book Award, and the Jewish Book Award. Stavans’s work, translated into twenty languages, has been adapted to the stage and screen. A cofounder of the Great Books Summer Program at Amherst, Stanford, Chicago, Oxford, and Dublin, he is the host of the NPR podcast "In Contrast."