FLEFF is honored to host Ithaca City of Asylum dissident writer RAAD RAHMAN for a special reading on Wed April 11 in the Handwerker Gallery on the Ithaca College campus.FLEFF is honored to host Ithaca City of Asylum dissident writer RAAD RAHMAN for a special reading on Wed April 11 in the Handwerker Gallery on the Ithaca College campus.
Raad Rahman, a journalist, essayist, and human rights advocate from Bangladesh, will be in Ithaca from April 8 to May 9 as a writer-in-residence with Ithaca City of Asylum (ICOA).
Rahman has worked for media and human rights organizations in the United Kingdom, India, Bangladesh, Jamaica, the US, and Hungary. She says she focuses her work on bringing repressed stories into the open. She has received death threats in Bangladesh for her writing on LGBT issues, and fellow journalists there have been murdered.
“The situation in Bangladesh is dire for writers,” she said. “Muslims like me are under attack. I want to continue to tell our stories at a time when diverse voices regarding Islam and Muslim females are few and far between in mainstream media.”
During her time in Ithaca, Rahman will give two public readings. On Wednesday, April 11, she will be the featured speaker for the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival’s literary showcase. Her reading from her work, “When the Politics Becomes Personal: Using Fiction and Nonfiction to Address Political Violations,” is at 6 p.m. at Ithaca College’s Handwerker Gallery.
On Sunday, May 6, she will read from her fiction as part of Ithaca’s Spring Writes Festival. Her presentation, “Love, Justice, and Extremism in Bangladesh,” is at Buffalo Street Books at 2 p.m.
In addition, Rahman will meet with students and faculty at Cornell University and Ithaca College during the course of her residency. She is scheduled to present a seminar at Cornell’s South Asia Program on Monday, April 23 at 12:15 p.m. in G08 Uris Hall.
Rahman’s writing has been published in the New York Times, the Paris Review, the Baffler, the Guardian, Guernica, VICE, the Rumpus, Roads and Kingdoms and by UNICEF. Guernica nominated one of her essays for the 2017 Pushcart Prize.
She has received fellowships and grants from the Rory Peck Trust, the International Women's Media Foundation, PEN America, Open Society Foundation, Bard College, and Harvard's Kennedy School, and completed residencies with the OMI International Arts Center, Hedgebrook and Hypatia-in-the-Woods. She has degrees from Central European University and Bard College.
Rahman plans to use her residency in Ithaca to work on her current project, a novel that tells the story of two teenagers pitted against each other by a high-profile terrorist attack, and also to finish a book of essays.
Ithaca City of Asylum, a not-for-profit project of the Center for Transformative Action, provides refuge in Ithaca for dissident writers and promotes freedom of expression. Founded in 2001, ICOA is one of two in North American members of the International Cities of Refuge Network, a worldwide consortium of cities of asylum. The project has hosted six writers for two-year residencies in Ithaca. Rahman is ICOA’s first short-term writer-in-residence.
Rahman says she plans to use her residency in Ithaca to work on the publication process of her second novel and to finish a book of essays.
The residency is made possible in part with funds from Cornell’s Office of the Vice Provost for International Affairs. ICOA is also a community partner of Ithaca College, the Tompkins County Public Library, and the Kitchen Theatre Company.
ICOA has been a longtime collaborative partner of the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival. The reading at Ithaca College is programmed by FLEFF's literary curator, Barbara Adams, Writing, Ithaca College.
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https://www.ithaca.edu/intercom/article.php/20180405234850450