Women’s Work
05.13.19 / 1pm
Scholastique Mukasonga + Randa Jarrar
Join authors Scholastique Mukasonga (The Barefoot Woman, Cockroaches) and Randa Jarrar (A Map of Home; Him, Me, Muhammad Ali) in conversation on writing womanhood—the work of mothers and daughters across time and place facing genocide, tradition, and memory. Moderated by Edwin Hill, Associate Professor of French and Italian and American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. A book signing will follow with Eso Won Books.
This event is presented in partnership with the Consulate General of France in Los Angeles. It is one of the 2019 PEN America World Voices Festival Los Angeles events.
Randa Jarrar’s work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Buzzfeed, The Utne Reader, Salon, The Offing, Guernica, The Rumpus, The Oxford American, Ploughshares, The Sun, Medium, and others. Her first book, the Arab-American coming of age novel, A Map of Home was published in seven languages and won a Hopwood Award and an Arab-American Book Award. Her most recent book, Him, Me, Muhammad Ali, won an American Book Award, a PEN Oakland Award, and a Story Prize Spotlight Award, and was named a Key Collection for Fall 2016 by Library Journal and one of Electric Literature‘s 25 best collections of the year.
Scholastique Mukasonga is a Rwandan author. Her family was displaced within Rwanda during her childhood, and she was later forced to flee to Burundi and then to France, where she settled in 1992. She lost 27 members of her family in the Rwandan genocide. Mukasonga wrote two acclaimed memoirs about her family’s experiences, Cockroaches and The Barefoot Woman, as well as the novel Our Lady of the Nile, which received the Prix Renaudot.