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Reading & Signing with Author Laila Lalami

Reading & Signing with Author Laila Lalami
. Please Note --> This is a Past Event!! .

Date: 3/14/2018
Time: 6:00 PM

416 N. Campus Drive
Fayetteville, AR 72701

Phone:
479-575-4373

Event Description: Laila Lalami, novelist, essayist and professor of creative writing at University of California at Riverside, will read from her novel The Moor's Account on Wednesday, March 14 at 6:00 p.m. in Giffels Auditorium (MAIN 201) on the University of Arkansas Campus. Refreshments will be served, and copies of The Moor's Account will be available for signing and purchase after the reading. The Moor’s Account was a finalist for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. It imagines the life of the first black explorer of America: a Moroccan slave whose voice is missing from the history books. In 1527, a Spanish expedition to Florida met with disaster. Four survivors—three Spanish noblemen and a Moroccan slave—lived with Native American tribes for six years before escaping and wandering through what is now Florida, Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. Years later, the Spaniards wrote and spoke about their ordeal, but the slave—Mustafa al-Zamori, always called Estevanico—was never asked to share his story. Finally, Lalami gives him a voice in The Moor’s Account, which Salman Rushdie called “an absorbing story of…a frightening, brutal, and much-falsified history.” Laila Lalami was born and raised in Morocco, a place whose past and present permeate her writing. A novelist, short story writer, and essayist, Lalami is a unique and confident voice in the conversations about race and immigration that increasingly occupy our national attention. Lalami is a regular contributor to publications such as The Nation, The Los Angeles Times, and The New York Times Magazine, weighing in on contemporary issues in the Arab world and North Africa. With what Junot Díaz calls “spare elegant prose” and Paul Yamazaki terms “carefully-wrought characters,” Lalami’s fiction confronts the same questions of race, displacement, and national identity that she addresses so eloquently in her essays and criticism. The lecture is presented by the King Fahd Center for Middle East Studies and the Program in Creative Writing and Translation.

Directions:
Giffels Auditorium (room 201) in the Old Main building on the University of Arkansas campus

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