Buffalo Area Poetry & Literature Calendar (week of Nov.26-Dec. 2)
Wednesday, 9 p.m.: Poetry Night at Caffe Aroma, biweekly open mic reading series hosted by Ben Brindise and Justin Karcher. 957 Elmwood Ave., Buffalo.
Thursday, 7:30 p.m.: Just Buffalo Literary Center presents a conversation between authors John Freeman and Omar El Akkad.
John Freeman is the founder of the literary annual Freeman’s, which has been a finalist for the National magazine award for fiction, and the author and editor of a dozen books, including the poetry collections Maps (Copper Canyon Press, 2017), The Park (Copper Canyon Press, 2020), and Wind, Trees (Copper Canyon Press, 2022). His nonfiction books include The Tyranny of E-mail: The Four-Thousand Year Journey to Your Inbox (Scribner. 2009), How to Read a Novelist (FSG Originals, 2013), and Dictionary of the Undoing (MCD x FSG Originals, 2019). With the poet Tracy K Smith, he co-edited the anthology There's a Revolution Outside, My Love (Vintage, 2021). Freeman was the editor of Granta magazine from 2009 to 2013, the executive editor of LitHub (2014 to 2020), and served six years on the board of the National Book Critics Circle. He lives in New York City, where he is an executive editor at Alfred A. Knopf, an artist-in-residence at New York University, and from where he hosts the California Book Club, a monthly zoom discussion of a new classic in Golden State literature, sponsored by Alta Magazine.
Omar El Akkad is an award-winning author and journalist. He was born in Egypt, grew up in Qatar, moved to Canada as a teenager and now lives in the United States. The start of his journalism career coincided with the start of the war on terror, and over the following decade he reported from Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay and many other locations around the world. His work earned a National Newspaper Award for Investigative Journalism and the Goff Penny Award for young journalists.
His fiction and non-fiction writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, Le Monde, Guernica, GQ, and many other newspapers and magazines.
El Akkad's debut novel, American War (Alfred A. Knopf, 2017) was an international bestseller and has been translated into thirteen languages. It is set in the United States in the near future, ravaged by climate change and disease, in which the Second Civil War has broken out over the use of fossil fuels. American War won the Pacific Northwest Booksellers’ Award, the Oregon Book Award for fiction, the Kobo Emerging Writer Prize, and has been nominated for more than ten other awards. It was listed as one of the best books of the year by The New York Times, Washington Post, GQ, NPR, and Esquire, and was selected by the BBC as one of 100 novels that changed our world.
El Akkad's second novel What Strange Paradise (Penguin Random House, 2021) centers on a young boy from Syria who has survived the sinking of a ship that was carrying him and other refugees, and his developing bond with a teenage girl who resides on the island where he washed up after the shipwreck, and expands to encompass issues raised by global refugee and migrant crisis, climate change, political polarization and instabilities, and how empathy and hope can persist in the face of indifference and despair. What Strange Paradise was the recipient of Canada's Giller Prize for Fiction in 2021.
The conversation will take place at Just Buffalo Literary Center, 468 Washington St., 2nd Floor, in Buffalo. Books from both authors will be available for purchase from Talking Leaves Books at the event.
The event is free and open to the public, but registration is encouraged at: https://www.justbuffalo.org/events/just-buffalo-presents-john-freeman-omar-el-akkad-2023-11-30/