In-person & live on Zoom
Literatures of Annihilation, Exile, and Resistance--an initiative at the intersection of the arts and human rights--is hosting an upcoming panel of critically acclaimed authors Amir Ahmadi Arian, Isabella Hammad, and Brandon Hobson in conversation with Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi. The readings and discourse will explore the facets of “The Political Life of the Novel.”
This event will be in person for the first time
Dr. Brandon Hobson is a 2022 Guggenheim fellow. He received his PhD from Oklahoma State University. His novel, Where the Dead Sit Talking, was a finalist for the National Book Award, winner of the Reading the West Award, and longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award, among other distinctions.
His short stories have won a Pushcart Prize and have appeared in The Best American Short Stories, McSweeney’s, Conjunctions, NOON, and elsewhere. He teaches creative writing at New Mexico State University and at the Institute of American Indian Arts and is the editor-in-chief of Puerto del Sol. He is an enrolled citizen of the Cherokee Nation Tribe of Oklahoma.
Isabella Hammad is the author of the critically acclaimed novel The Parisian (Grove Press, 2019), which won the 2019 Palestine Book Award. She was a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Honoree, and the debut was praised by the New York Times Book Review as a “dazzling…deeply-imagined historical novel.” A love story set amidst the political tumult of Palestine in the early 20th century, The Parisian was awarded the the Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Betty Trask Award from the Society of Authors in the UK, and the Plimpton Prize. She is also the author of the amazingly erudite essay, Recognizing the Stranger (Grove Atlantic, 2024), on the Palestinian struggle and the power of narrative.
The Parisian illuminates a pivotal period of Palestinian history through the journey and romances of one young man, from his studies in France during World War I to his return home to Palestine at the dawn of its battle for independence. “Written in soulful, searching prose,” The Guardian continues: “it’s a jam-packed epic that sets the life of one man against the backdrop of the fall of the Ottoman empire, the British mandate over Palestine and the Arab uprising for independence. Hammad wades through more than 20 years of political upheaval to explore ideas about cultural identity, parental betrayal and the accidental harm we often cause others.”
She is also the author of the novel Enter Ghost, which won the 2024 Aspen Words Literary Prize; a bold, evocative story, the novel follows actress Sonia as she returns to Palestine and takes a role in a West Bank production of Hamlet. Of Hammad’s second book, Leila Aboulela says: “Aesthetically, intellectually, emotionally and culturally satisfying. It is astonishing but true that Isabella Hammad is incapable of striking a false note. She immerses her heroine in volatile territory with the accuracy, compassion and coolness of a surgical knife sliding into a diseased body. The result is a stunning beauty — an eye-opening, uplifting novel that grants its vulnerable cast and their endeavors a rare and graceful dignity.”
Her writing has appeared in Conjunctions, The Paris Review, The New York Times and elsewhere. Her story “Mr. Can’aan” won the 2019 O. Henry Prize and the 2018 Plimpton Prize for Fiction.
Born in London, Hammad obtained her undergraduate degree in English Language and Literature from Oxford University. In 2020 she received a Lannan Literary Fellowship for Fiction, in 2012 she was awarded a Kennedy Scholarship to Harvard GSAS, and in 2013 she received the Harper Wood Creative Writing Studentship from Cambridge University. During her MFA in Fiction at New York University she was a Stein Fellow, and she was the 2016-2017 Axinn Foundation NYU Writer-in-Residence. She was named one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists. Enter Ghost won the Aspen Words Literary Prize and the Encore Award, and was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction. She has taught fiction and creative writing at Brown University, NYU, and Al-Quds Bard College, and she is currently the Mary Ellen von der Heyden Fellow at the Cullman Center at the New York Public Library.
Amir Ahmadi Arian was born in Ahvaz, Iran. he spent his childhood in the war zone of the Iran-Iraq war where his mother was a nurse in frontline hospitals.
Amir started his writing career in Iran in 2000. He has published two novels, a collection of stories, and a book of nonfiction in Persian. He also translated from English to Persian novels by E.L Doctorow, Paul Auster, P.D. James, and Cormac McCarthy. Amir left Iran in 2011 to undertake a PhD in comparative literature at the University of Queensland, Australia.
Since 2014 he has been writing exclusively in English. In this phase of his career, he has published short stories and essays in The New York Times, Harper’s, New York Review of Books, Paris Review, LRB, Lithub, Massachusetts Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, etc.
Amir earned an MFA in the NYU Creative Writing Program as The Axinn Foundation/E.L. Doctorow Fellowship recipient of 2016 - 2018.
His first novel in English, Then The Fish Swallowed Him, was published by HarperVia/HarperCollins in March 2020.
He is an Assistant professor of Creative Writing at Binghamton University and lives in Ithaca, New York.
Literatures of Annihilation, Exile, and Resistance, launched by Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi, is a research collective and lecture series co-sponsored by the College of Arts and Letters and the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame, and housed at the Initiative on Race and Resilience, directed by Mark Sanders, Professor of English and Africana Studies. The series focuses on contemporary literature, film, and visual art that has been shaped by revolutionary and resistance movements, decolonization, migration, class and economic warfare, communal and state-sanctioned violence, and human rights violations. We aim to theorize new modes of contemporary literary and artistic resistance across national borders and to amplify the voices of scholars, artists, and writers of color whose lived experience is instrumental in forging new alliances across formal, linguistic and national boundaries.
This event is hosted by the Initiative on Race and Resilience and co-sponsored by the MFA Program in Creative Writing, the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, and the Department of English.