Ithaca College's Distinguished Visiting Writers Series, supported by the Department of Writing and the School of Humanities and Sciences, wraps up its spring reading series this Monday with a virtual brown-bag reading and discussion by Dina Nayeri, author of The Ungrateful Refugee, to take place at from 12:10 to 1:05 p.m.
Dina Nayeri is the author of two novels and a book of creative nonfiction, The Ungrateful Refugee, winner of the Geschwister Scholl Preis and finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. You can read here the essay in The Guardian from which this book evolved.
In addition to writing two works of fiction, A Teaspoon of Earth and Sea and Refuge, Nayeri also collaborated with documentary photographer Anna Bosch Miralpeix for the forthcoming book The Waiting Place: When Home Is Lost and a New One Not Yet Found. Here is the publisher's description:
Every war, famine, and flood spits out survivors.
The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) cites an unprecedented 79.5 million forcibly displaced people on the planet today. In 2018, Dina Nayeri—a former refugee herself and the daughter of a refugee—invited documentary photographer Anna Bosch Miralpeix to accompany her to Katsikas, a refugee camp outside Ioannina, Greece, to record the hopes and struggles of ten young Farsi-speaking refugees from Iran and Afghanistan. “I wanted to play with them, to enter their imagined worlds, to see the landscape inside their minds,” she says. Ranging in age from five to seventeen, the children live in partitioned shipping-crate homes crowded on a field below a mountain. Battling a dreary monster that wants to rob them of their purpose, dignity, and identity, each survives in his or her own special way.
The Waiting Place is an unflinching look at ten young lives suspended outside of time—and bravely proceeding anyway. Each lyrical passage leads the reader from one story to the next, revealing the dreams, ambitions, and personalities of each displaced child. The stories are punctuated by intimate photographs, followed by the author’s reflections on life in a refugee camp. Locking the global refugee crisis sharply in focus, The Waiting Place is an urgent call to change what we teach young people about the nature of home and safety.
An unflinching look at ten young lives suspended outside of time—and bravely proceeding anyway—inside the Katsikas refugee camp in Greece.
A 2019-2020 Fellow at the Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination in Paris and winner of the 2018 UNESCO City of Literature Paul Engle Prize, Dina has won a National Endowment for the Arts literature grant, the O. Henry Prize, and Best American Short Stories, among other honors. Her work has been published in 20+ countries and in The New York Times, The Guardian, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, Granta, and elsewhere. She is a graduate of Princeton, Harvard, and the Iowa Writers Workshop. She teaches writing at the University of St Andrews.
