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All of Us, Everywhere: An International Response to the Pandemic

Free

Online Event

Tuesday, 1:00 pm EDT September 15, 2020

In partnership with Restless Books, a panel of authors and artists will share their perspectives on our changing reality from outside the mainstream pipeline of news and noise. Their conversation will be moderated by Ilan Stavans.

In April, as the virus surged, Restless Books asked seventy writers and translators from thirty-four countries and every inhabited continent to send essays, fiction, poetry, drawings, and other artistic responses to the pandemic. The ensuing anthology, And We Came Outside and Saw the Stars Again, is a rich, eye-opening, and truly global portrait of how lives are changing in places as diverse as Palestine, Mauritius, Mexico, Russia, Spain, India, Lebanon, and Taiwan.

Our literary culture depends on bookstores—and those irreplaceable sources of conversation and community, of inspiration and solace, have been decimated by the lockdown. Net proceeds from And We Came Outside and Saw the Stars Again will go to the Book Industry Charitable Foundation, which helps the passionate booksellers we readers depend upon.

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In Conversation

  • Majed+Abusalama

    Majed Abusalama

    Majed Abusalama

    Born and raised in the Jabalia refugee camp in Gaza, Majed Abusalama is an award-winning journalist, scholar, and human rights activist. His articles are regularly featured in Middle East Eye, Mondoweiss, Deutsche Welle, BABelmed, and Al Jazeera, among others. On the board of We Are Not Numbers, co-founder of Palestine Speaks Coalition in Germany, and the Hebrew website www.border-gone.com, he lives in Berlin.

  • Khalid Albaih

    Khalid Albaih

    Khalid Albaih

    Romanian-born and Qatari-raised, Sudanese artist and political cartoonist Khalid Albaih is based in Copenhagen, Denmark, where he is the International Cities of Refuge Network (ICORN) PEN Artist-in-Residence. His cartoons have appeared in the New York Times, the Atlantic, NPR, and the BBC. His commentary is published in the Guardian, CNN, and Al Jazeera.

  • Nadia+Christidi+©+Scott+Davis.jpg

    Nadia Christidi

    Nadia Christidi

    Nadia Christidi is a researcher, writer, and arts practitioner based between Cambridge, MA and Beirut, Lebanon. Nadia is currently a PhD candidate in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology, and Society at MIT, where she studies how cities that face water supply challenges, which are expected to intensify with climate change, are imagining, planning, and preparing for the future of water. The cites she focuses on are Los Angeles, Dubai, and Cape Town. Her work has been exhibited at Beirut Art Center, SALT Galata (Istanbul), and SALT Ulus (Ankara), and published by ArteEast and ArtAsiaPacific.

  • Ana Simo - large

    Ana Simo

    Ana Simo

    Ana Simo is the author of a dozen plays, a short feature film, and countless articles. A New Yorker most of her life, she was born and raised in Cuba. Forced to leave the island during the political/homophobic witch-hunts of the late 1960s, she first immigrated to France, where she studied with Roland Barthes and participated in early women’s and gay/lesbian rights groups. In New York next, she co-founded Medusa’s Revenge theatre, the direct action group the Lesbian Avengers, the national cable program Dyke TV, and the groundbreaking The Gully online magazine, offering queer views on everything. Heartland, her first novel, was published by Restless Books in 2018. It was a finalist for the 2019 Triangle Lit Awards for the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction.

  • ilan stavans

    Ilan Stavans

    Ilan Stavans

    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.”