Friday, May 20  | Two Truths Salon  |  7-10pm
@ Sunita Bar
106 Norfolk St, New York, NY 10002
$7 Entry Fee | RSVP Here
Two Truths and a Lie: South Asian Women and Trans Writers Bend the Truth
South Asian Women’s Creative Collective (SAWCC) presents its 8th annual Literary Festival We have Arrived: From Bollywood to Badass, a two-day interdisciplinary public event in New York City. The Festival will kickoff on Friday, May 20, at 7 PM with a reading by participants of the Two Truths Writing Workshop at Sunita Bar. This will follow with panel discussions and interactive workshops on Saturday, May 21, beginning at 12 PM and conclude with a keynote at 6:30 PM by Mira Jacob. All Saturday sessions will take place at the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, the go-to destination for Asian American literary events in New York.
Writing from life can be a tricky business. There are people to protect, faulty memories of events, and the pitfalls of self-censorship and self-aggrandizement. Please join us for an evening salon with alumni from Bushra Rehman’s Two Truths workshop series: South Asian women and trans writers reading original works.
About the Writers
Adeeba Afshan Rana is a poet and librarian who reads and writes in Brooklyn, NY. She often goes on adventures, works with young people, swims in oceans, and cooks meals for family and friends. Adeeba earned her MFA in poetry from Stonecoast at the University of Southern Maine and her Master’s in Library Science at Pratt Institute. She aspires to be a goddess of knowledge.
Bushra Rehman grew up in Corona, Queens, but her mother says she was born in an ambulance flying through the streets of Brooklyn. Her first novel Corona, a dark comedy about being South Asian American, was noted by Poets & Writers among 2013’s Best Debut Fiction and featured in LA Review of Books as a work of radical South-Asian American Literature. She co-edited the anthology Colonize This! Young Women of Color on Today’s Feminism, one of Ms. Magazine’s 100 Best Non-Fiction Books of All Time. Rehman’s first Young Adult novel will be released by Tor/Macmillan in 2017.
Fatimah Shalash is a Kentucky native with a noticeable lack of accent. She is in the midst of her second Two Truths class, where she is exploring what it means to be raised Muslim, but to tread her own path, inevitably causing friction and freedom with family, culture, and self. Currently, she is a full-time high school college counselor in NYC and lives in Brooklyn.
Jai Dulani won a slam at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe when he was 18. He has performed his poetry on WBAI 90.5, at rallies and community based events, and toured in 2007 as part of Mangoes With Chili, a queer and trans people of color cabaret. He has been a Kundiman Asian American Poet Fellow, a VONA/Voices Fellow, and a BCAT/Rotunda Gallery Multi-media Artist-in-residence. His work has appeared in SAMAR, bustingbinaries, and the anthology, Experiments in a Jazz Aesthetic. Black Girl Dangerous published his video, Caster Semenya: Wrong Is Not Her Name in 2015. Dulani is co-editor of the anthology, The Revolution Starts At Home: Confronting Intimate Violence in Activist Communities. He is currently an Open City Fellow through the Asian American Writers Workshop.
Nadia Misir is a writer from Richmond Hill. She is an avid book hoarder and bubble tea enthusiast.
Rathini Kandavel is a Tamil-Sri Lankan-American, queer and transgender writer. He hails from Southern California and moved coasts to NYC in 2003 armed with a degree in World Literature from the University of California, San Diego. After educating young people for ten years in the public school system, he realized something was missing and decided to start a career in writing after participating in Bushra Rehman’s Two Truths workshop series in February 2016. With the support of his wife, he threw caution to the wind (something he normally does not do), unpacked and rearranged jobs, relationships, and identities and has not looked back since. Inspiration for his material comes from his experiences growing up in the Tamil-Sri Lankan community in Los Angeles.
Rekha Malhotra is a curator, producer, educator based in New York City. Her work has appeared in the Fader, Asian American Literary Review, The Record (catalogue accompanying exhibit of same name) from Duke University Press.
Tara Sarath is a writer, literary publicist, procrastinator, and indefatigable defender of the original Star Trek series. She wrote non-fiction once for The Indypendent and poetry once for Pieces of Cake. She is also a proud organizer of SubDrift NYC, an open mic night for artists of all stripes: https://www.facebook.com/subdriftnyc/.
Vani Natarajan is a librarian with an overdue book problem (her own). Her sun is in Scorpio, her moon is in Pisces, her ascendant is in Aquarius, her heart is in poetry, and her muscles are in fiction—but then again, the heart is a muscle. Growing up on a peninsula in Southern Virginia, Vani dreamed of meeting other people who love to write and read and be tender and fierce and magical and funny together—she is so thankful for the community she has found in Two Truths and a Lie.
Veda Kumarjiguda never grew out of playing pretend. The director, actress, and writer most recently co-wrote and directed the one-woman play Noman’s Land, which successfully debuted at the 2015 Edinburgh Fringe Festival. In 2014 she performed in the NYc Fringe Festival’s play No One Asked Me. Tonight she is reading from Shelter For Uncles her work-in-progress novel.
Special thanks to Bushra Rehman for organizing this event.
All events are open to the public. No one will be turned away for lack of funds. For questions about the festival or more information, please email litfest@sawcc.org. This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.