AASU & AAST Townhall: Conversations with Marina Budhos

AASU invites you to a conversation with Marina Budhos, a professor and an author of award winning fiction and nonfiction, as she joins us for a reading of her latest book, Watched, a story about surveillance in the post 9/11 era. Author’s Note: “I wrote this book while buffeted by painful headlines—the terrorist attacks in Paris, sting operations and further attacks in the U.S., and the rise of ISIS and their slick recruitment of young people. My aim is to tell the human story behind the headlines; the complicated choices and pressures teenagers face— especially Muslim teenagers—when their world is so riven and made precarious by violence, extremism, intolerance and mistrust.” After the reading, Marina will lead us through a writing workshop on The Political and The Personal answering questions such as: How, as writers or as those who wish to use writing as a form of expression, do we find a voice in our political times? How do we marry the particular of our own experiences with the broader political currents we are living in? How do we press through the silences and fears to speak to our own truths? Come out to delve further into your own identity as you mine for your own voice in the larger world.