New York Event: What does it mean to write America now?
ICE agents are pulling people off the streets and out of courtrooms. The Supreme Court has gutted what remained of the Voting Rights Act. Civil rights protections built over decades are being dismantled, department by department, memo by memo.
What does it mean to write America now? We bring together four writers to reflect on what it means to report on, live in, and make sense of a country we call home at a time of deep political rupture. What does it mean to tell stories with rigor and care, without collapsing into despair or propaganda? How do we write democracy as it is lived, contested, and enforced today?
Nearly two centuries ago, Alexis de Tocqueville traveled across the United States and wrote ‘Democracy in America’ as an outsider trying to understand the country’s political experiment. This conversation returns to that impulse, but from a different lens. What does it mean now for writers of the diaspora, as immigrants to move through America and write about it, not as distant observers, but as people shaped by and implicated in its systems of power?
On May 15th, we’re bringing together four writers who have been asking exactly these questions, each in their own way.
Aruni Kashyap is the author of The Way You Want To Be Loved and The House With a Thousand Stories, with a new novel, How to Date a Fanatic, forthcoming.
Zara Chowdhary is a writer, producer, and educator, and the author of The Lucky Ones.
Anjali Enjeti is a journalist, activist, poll worker, and former attorney, and the author of Southbound, The Parted Earth, and Ballot.
Suchitra Vijayan is Executive Director of The Polis Project and the author of Midnight’s Borders and How Long Can the Moon Be Caged?
Come be part of this conversation.
Friday, May 15 | 6 to 9 p.m. The People’s Forum, 320 W 37th St, New York, NY