Maine Lit Fest Event - Day 9
On this panel, we’ll hear from transnational writers whose work explores displacement, relocation, identity, and home. Sudanese-American writer Safia Elhillo (Girls That Never Die and Home is Not a Country), Somali-American author Abdi Nor Iftin (Call Me American), and Croatian writer Robert Perišić (A Cat at the End of the World) will discuss what it means to search for belonging across borders and write about home countries altered beyond recognition. Zahir Janmohamed (multi-genre author, educator, and co-founder of the podcast Racist Sandwich) will moderate.
This event is free.
Books will be sold by Longfellow Books.
Safia Elhillo is the author of The January Children (University of Nebraska Press, 2017), which received the the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets and an Arab American Book Award, Girls That Never Die (One World/Random House, 2022), and the novel in verse Home Is Not A Country (Make Me A World/Random House, 2021), which was longlisted for the National Book Award and received a Coretta Scott King Book Award Author Honor.
Sudanese by way of Washington, DC, Safia received the 2015 Brunel International African Poetry Prize, and was listed in Forbes Africa’s 2018 “30 Under 30.” Her work appears in Poetry Magazine, Callaloo, and The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-day series, among others, and in anthologies including The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop and The Penguin Book of Migration Literature. Her work has been translated into several languages, and commissioned by Under Armour, Cuyana, and the Bavarian State Ballet. With Fatimah Asghar, she is co-editor of the anthology Halal If You Hear Me (Haymarket Books, 2019).
Her fellowships include a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, Cave Canem, and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University.
Born in Mogadishu to nomadic parents, Abdi Nor Iftin survived famine, war, and child soldiering. Thanks to the movies available to him, he taught himself English by watching American action films. By repeating and imitating the carefree actors, he earned himself the nickname “Abdi American”. Through guerrilla journalism, Abdi dispatched stories about his life to a series titled Messages From Mogadishu on American Public Media. His stories were short listed for Peabody Awards in 2016. These stories were picked by NPR, the BBC and later This American Life.
After surviving a bombing at his house one evening in 2009, Abdi finally said goodbye to his home country and moved to Kenya where he and his brother lived as refugees. In an amazing stroke of luck, he won entrance to the U.S. in August 2014, in the annual visa lottery, though his route to America—ending in a harrowing sequence of events that nearly stranded him in Nairobi—did not come easily.
Now Abdi is a bestselling and award-winning author based in the state of Maine. He’s been featured by CNN, NPR, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Boston Globe. Abdi is an advocate for refugee and immigrant rights. He is dedicated to bringing people together through his stories of survival and resilience. He is currently working on a documentary based on his memoir Call Me American.
Robert Perišić is an Croatian author, born in Split in 1969. Translations of his works were published in numerous European countries and the US. He is best known for his prose, and also writes poetry, plays and film scripts.
His novel “Naš čovjek na terenu” (“Our Man in Iraq”) won the prestigious "Jutarnji list award" in Croatia. The American edition of the novel was included in US top translation lists in 2013, along with praise from critics (The New Yorker, Publisher’s Weekly, National Public Radio, etc.) and writers, such as Jonathan Franzen. The German edition of the novel (‘Unser Mann vor Ort’) received ‘Literaturpreis der Steiermärkischen Sparkasse 2011’ in Graz, Austria.
The novel “Područje bez signala” (“Area With No Coverage”) published in 2015 was in finalist for the “Meša Selimović” award (Tuzla, Bosnia and Herzegovina) and the T-portal award for best Croatian novel, and the American and French edition are currently being prepared.
Published works: poetry collection “Dvorac Amerika” (“Castle America”) of 1995, short story collections “Možeš pljunuti onoga tko bude pitao za nas” (“You may spit on the person who asks about us”) of 1999 and “Užas i veliki troškovi” (“Terror And High Costs”) of 2002, novel “Naš čovjek na terenu” of 2007, essay “Uvod u smiješni ples” (“Introduction To a Funny Dance”) of 2011, poetry collection “Jednom kasnije” (“Once, Later”) of 2012, play “Kultura u predgrađu” (“Culture In the Suburbs”) staged in Gavella, Zagreb, in 2000, film script for the feature film “100 minuta Slave” (“100 Minutes of Glory”) of 2004, and the novel “Područje bez signala” of 2015.
Robert Perisic (Robert Perišić) lives in Zagreb and works as a freelance writer.
Zahir Janmohamed is a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Bowdoin College. He received his MFA in fiction at the University of Michigan where he received awards in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and playwriting. In 2019, the podcast he co-founded, Racist Sandwich, was nominated for a James Beard Award.
He has received fellowships from MacDowell, where he was the inaugural recipient of the Anne Cox Chambers fellowship for long-form journalism, as well as from Tin House, the Arab American National Museum, The Mesa Refuge, the Djerassi Resident Arts Program, the Norman Mailer Center, and the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto. He is a three-time alumnus of the VONA workshop for writers of color, a 2017 fiction fellow at Kundiman, a 2017 New Voices Scholar, and the recipient of the inaugural Katherine Bakeless Fiction Scholarship at Bread Loaf.
His articles have appeared in The New York Times, Foreign Policy, Guernica, The Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, Newsweek, CNN, NPR, The Boston Review, The Guardian, McSweeney's, Scroll India, The Economic Times and many other publications.
His media appearances include NPR, CNN, BBC, CBC, Al Jazeera, Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher, Live Wire, The Dear Sugar Podcast, and others.
Aside from his writing career, he has spent over a decade working in politics.