Hybrid | Brown Women Have Everything: Sayantani Dasgupta with Tommy Hays & Susanne Antonetta

Name: Hybrid | Brown Women Have Everything: Sayantani Dasgupta with Tommy Hays & Susanne Antonetta
Start: 2024-09-29T17:00:00-04:00
Location: 55 Haywood St, Asheville, NC, United States, North Carolina 28801

Schedule

Sun Sep 29 2024 at 05:00 pm

UTC-04:00

Location

55 Haywood St, Asheville, NC, United States, North Carolina 28801 | Asheville, NC

Free hybrid event. RSVP to join us live online or in-person at Malaprop's: https://www.malaprops.com/node/55013
As a child growing up in New Delhi, Sayantani Dasgupta wanted to go on adventures involving shipwrecks and treasure chests. Her parents wanted her to stay in school instead. She satisfied her curiosity by drawing maps, inventing languages with friends, and reading everything: English adventures, Russian folktales, Hindi comics, Bengali ghost stories.
Brown Women Have Everything embraces the same spirit of wonder as we follow Dasgupta, now living and teaching in the United States, to cathedrals in Italy, pirate graveyards in North Carolina, hair salons in Idaho, her aunt's kitchen in Bangladesh, graffiti-lined streets of Colombia, the hierarchical world of academia, and her marriage to a handsome Sikh. As she moves through the world, she examines issues of the body, violence, travel, and belonging with a mix of humor, joy, pride, and outrage. While the eighteen interwoven essays in this collection call out bigotry, bias, and othering, they ultimately celebrate the ties that bind our disparate, global lives together.
Born in Calcutta and raised in New Delhi, Sayantani Dasgupta is the author of Brown Women Have Everything: Essays on (Dis)comfort and Delight. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Idaho. Previous books include the short story collection Women Who Misbehave, the chapbook The House of Nails: Memories of a New Delhi Childhood, and Fire Girl: Essays on India, America, & the In-Between, a Finalist for the Foreword Indies Awards for Creative Nonfiction. She has been awarded a Centrum Foundation Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize Special Mention, and the WILMA Woman of the Year in Arts for 2022. She is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at UNC Wilmington, and is the founder of Write Wilmington, a community writing workshop. Besides the US, Sayantani has also taught writing in India, Italy, Colombia, and Mexico.
Tommy Hays’s novel, The Pleasure Was Mine was a Finalist for the SIBA Fiction Award and chosen for numerous community reads. His other novels are Sam’s Crossing and In the Family Way, winner of the Thomas Wolfe Memorial Literary Award and a selection of the Book of the Month Club. Hays’s middle grade novel, What I Came to Tell You was as a SIBA Okra Pick. He’s published stories in magazines and literary journals such as Redbook, Our State, Smoky Mountain Living, The Chattahoochee Review and storySouth. He was recently inducted into the South Carolina Academy of Authors and named to the Order of the Long Leaf Pine, the highest civilian honor bestowed by the governor of North Carolina. He’s a member of the Board of Trustees for the North Carolina Writer’s Network and is retired Executive Director of the Great Smokies Writing Program at UNC Asheville. He is a graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.
Susanne Paola Antonetta writes and speaks regularly on neurodiversity, psychiatry and psychiatric history, and the environment. Her latest book is The Terrible Unlikelihood of Our Being Here. Forthcoming from Counterpoint in 2025 is The Devil's Castle. She is also the author of Make Me a Mother, Entangled Objects, Body Toxic, A Mind Apart, and four books of poetry. Awards include a New York Times Notable Book, an American Book Award, an Amazon best memoir of the year award, and others. Her essays and poems have appeared in The New York Times, Ms., The Huffington Post, The UK Independent, The Hill, Orion, Psychology Today and The New Republic and been featured on CNN as well as the CBC Ideas documentary series. She lives in Asheville, North Carolina.
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