In celebration of ten years since the establishment of the Alan Cheuse International Writers Center at George Mason University, the center brought together international artists in a week-long festival titled “Imagining Sanctuary” to discuss place, and to reflect on the artist’s role during history’s challenging moments. The festival was attended by five hundred people from over 42 cities.
The 10th Anniversary Festival lineup included bestselling Irish writer Colm Tóibín, German journalist-filmmaker Malte Herwig, Polish poet and musician Grzegorz Kwiatkowski, local civil society activists and archivists Lisa Fager and Laura Thoms, and writers and teachers Lisa Page and Martheaus Lamar Perkins. In a week-long literary delight, they presented their work to local communities in Washington, D.C. and Virginia.
Colm Tóibín delivering the Fourth Cheuse Lecture on April 23, 2026
Foreground: Travel Door, Installation, Steven Luu
The meandering road snaking its way through the diverse events of the week took participants on a journey of memory, intertwined with musings on refuge and redemption, accompanied by tears and laughter, and culminating in a visit to two historic DC cemeteries, each with dozens of captivating stories to tell.
hosted by the Embassy of Ireland thanks to Solas Nua
On April 22nd, 2026, to honor Colm Tóibín’s arrival in Washington and to introduce his latest book of short stories The News from Dublin, the Embassy of Ireland, hosted a reception orchestrated by Andrew Dolan, director of the Irish multidisciplinary arts non-profit Solas Nua alongside the Cheuse Center. The event was attended by a crowd of literati, the family of Alan Cheuse, and many friends of the center. Tóibín’s international bestsellers include Brooklyn, Long Island, Nora Webster, and The Magician, among others. He was warmly welcomed by the Ambassador of Ireland to the United States, Geraldine Byrne Nason, who celebrated his international renown and praised the Cheuse Center’s commitment to international literary arts. Tóibín, known for his ironic wit, shared anecdotes that prompted bursts of laughter from the audience.
The following day, when Tóibín delivered the fourth annual Cheuse Lecture at the Stacy C. Sherwood Community Center in Fairfax, his tone was at times more solemn as he reflected on the times in history when “something more than irony is required.” He compared the pre-World War II era with present-day rhetoric that seems to question the idea of refuge. During the War, several German writers sought refuge in Los Angeles, often keeping apart from American life. Tóibín cautioned against the denial of America’s immigrant history. He talked about one of his acclaimed books, The Magician, a fictionalized biography of the German writer and public intellectual Thomas Mann, who sought refuge in the United States after fleeing Nazi Germany in 1938.
Mann’s escape was facilitated by Agnes Meyer, the mother of a longtime Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham. In discussing The Magician, which details the intricacies of Meyer’s relationship with Mann, Tóibín quipped about the contrast between the gratitude that Mann must have felt obliged to express publicly for the influential patroness who had saved his life by helping his family move to the United States and establish himself in American literary and political circles, and the private frustrations expressed in his diaries, where Meyer was referred to as a “decidedly hysterical woman in Washington.”
After the lecture, Tóibín was interviewed on stage by the German journalist Malte Herwig, whose award-winning doctoral dissertation defended at Oxford University focused on Mann’s work. Tóibín’s in-depth knowledge of Mann’s life through his books, letters, and diaries was complemented by Herwig’s native understanding of the cultural undercurrents that formed the thinking of Mann and other German exiles. They spoke of the “low dishonest decade” in the words of W. H. Auden’s September 1, 1939, debating the use of the phrase to describe a historical moment and agreeing that remaining silent in times of authoritarian repression is equivalent to supporting it, a theme that ran like a golden thread through the discussion.
Tóibín and Herwig had a fruitful discussion on Mann’s transformation from a royalist and self-proclaimed nonpolitical writer, who initially viewed Western democracy as antithetical and inferior to Germany’s history and mission, into a staunch supporter of democracy. Herwig insisted that this transformation was not as straightforward as many believe and quoted Mann as saying that democracy must make an effort to prove “its undoubted moral superiority over fascism” and “must do away with the habit of taking itself for granted, of assuming that it is a matter of course. It must be led to a renewed self-examination and self-experience.”
Yet, Tóibín argued, Mann’s words about imagining Germany’s transformation into a democracy and declaring "Wherever I am, that is where Germany is" may have played a role in the ideas that later transformed into the Marshall Plan.
The next day, on April 24th, history continued to be examined, as Herwig’s role shifted from that of an interviewer to that of an interviewee during the premiere of his documentary The Girl with Golden Hair at the Goethe-Institut Washington, one of the sponsors of the Cheuse Festival. The film documents Herwig’s discovery in the family attic of his grandfather’s photographs in uniform, with Jewish families behind him looking straight into the camera in the midst of their deportation from Nazi-occupied Poland.
Herwig’s conviction that “many people in Germany have a Nazi grandpa, but no one wants to talk about it” led him on a search of spaces where his family’s dark secret intersects with the tragic histories of families in the photos, most of whom are assumed to have perished in the Holocaust. After making the film, Herwig transferred his photographic archive to the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington.
Herwig was in conversation with the Polish poet and musician Grzegorz Kwiatkowski. The two confronted challenging questions of prejudice, historical justice and belonging, and shared powerful stories of growing antisemitism in Europe. Currently a visiting writer with the Cheuse Center, Kwiatkowski was born in Gdansk, where Nazi forces launched their invasion of Eastern Europe in 1939. His op-ed, published earlier this year by the Guardian, recalls his grandfather’s visit to the site of his World War II-era imprisonment at the Stutthof concentration camp. By bringing the nine-year old Grzegorz there, his grandfather sought to ensure that painful history is not forgotten and thus is less likely to be repeated.
The intertwining of tragic histories of peoples subjected to hatred and prejudice continued through the last event of the week – a tour of two adjacent DC cemeteries led by the Director of Mount Zion - Female Union Band Society Cemeteries Lisa Fager and Oak Hill Cemetery's Archivist Laura Thoms. The stories buried in the cemeteries’ history reflect many facets of Washington’s past, including its colonial era, racial division, and modern cultural diversity.
Oak Hill Cemetery, in the picturesque and affluent D.C. neighborhood of Georgetown is the final resting place of many prominent Washington politicians, businessmen, and modern cultural icons, including Katharine Graham and Madeleine Albright. Founded by William Corcoran in 1850, the cemetery was designed as a sculptural garden, in which changing seasons were intended to provide consolation in grief, Laura Thoms told the group of tour attendees. Its landmark chapel was designed by James Renwick, the author of the Smithsonian Castle. A walk through the cemetery’s peaceful paths reveals names familiar from history books and from the names of DC streets: Forrest, Willard, Reno, Barnes, Van Ness, and many, many others.
Oak Hill also has a crypt where the body of Abraham Lincoln's young son, William Lincoln, reportedly had a temporary resting place, although, according to Thoms, there are no official records corroborating this story. Nevertheless, the writer George Saunders was so fascinated by the tale that he retold it in his experimental novel Lincoln in the Bardo.
The cemetery is non-denominational: one of the oldest graves belongs to David Yulee, a Jewish Confederate who was buried there in 1886. It also has an 1890 grave belonging to the first known Korean ever born on U.S. soil: Ye Washon was the two-month-old son of a minister of the Korean diplomatic mission. At Oak Hill, history intertwines with modernity, and dates on neighboring tombstones may be separated by weeks, years, or whole centuries. According to Thoms, any available space that can accommodate an urn or a body burial, is eventually utilized. She also explained that the process has become more transparent over the years: anyone who can afford the steep price may apply for a burial plot.
In contrast, the Mount Zion - Female Union Band Society burial grounds are on the DC Preservation League’s list of endangered historic places due to decades of neglect, erosion, and stormwater damage. The cemetery’s centuries-long history tells a story of enslavement, abolition, gender inequality, racial segregation, and activism. It was a part of the Underground Railroad where enslaved people could hide on their way north to freedom, said Lisa Fager, the executive director of the Black Georgetown Foundation, the nonprofit that oversees the cemetery. Fager guided visitors across the cemetery’s grounds while tracing more than 250 years of its history, with these cemeteries predating Oak Hill.
In 1808, an interracial Methodist congregation purchased the land for burials in what was then a majority-Black DC neighborhood – Georgetown. By 1816, the Black members of that congregation formed their own church, which later became Mount Zion, said Fager. In 1842, three Black women formed a mutual aid society, in which women could purchase a membership for 25 cents a month. Members could get assistance in emergencies and, perhaps most importantly, have a guaranteed plot in the cemetery grounds. Racial divisions prevailed, and by 1849 many White parishioners of the Methodist Church had disinterred their relatives from the Mount Zion cemetery and reinterred them in the adjacent Oak Hill cemetery. Since then, the cemeteries’ history mirrored the segregated history of the city. Graves at the “Black” cemetery fell into disrepair, in contrast to the “White” cemetery that was well taken care of.
“That kind of work, personal, persistent, strategic is what abolition looked like on the ground,” Fager said.
Both cemeteries play an important role in preserving the city’s history. In one highlighted case, Reverend Joseph Cartwright first purchased his own freedom and then spent years raising money to purchase his wife and children from different enslavers to reconstruct his family.
A century and a half later, long after slavery has been abolished and segregation outlawed, the two cemeteries that stand so close together are still starkly different, or, in the words of an anonymous poet,
“These cities stand together
like Buda and Pest,
Here it’s not water,
It’s the color test.”
One Mount Zion grave that has long attracted visitors’ attention belongs to a child named Nannie who died in 1856 at the age of eight. People bring toys and cards to Nannie’s grave, but on the day following Juneteenth in 2003, someone set it on fire.
In times when more than irony is required, activists work to preserve history, and artists make art that ignites imagination. The festival week culminated in a poetry reading featuring Grzegorz Kwiatkowski, a poet Martheus Lamar Perkins, essayist and director of the George Washington University’s MFA program Lisa Page, and the Cheuse Center director Leeya Mehta.
In the charming Renwick-designed Oak Hill chapel, Lisa Page read from an essay she wrote for the event, recounting that the street of her grandfather’s house in Michigan was divided by railroad tracks.
“It was paved on the ‘White’ side. It was a dirt road on the ‘Black’ side, and the houses were run down. This scenario has presented itself throughout my life. Privilege and success, cheek by jowl, with neglect and deprivation next to excess… The White story is still one of value and respect, while the Black story remains one of erasure, shame, and loss,” Page reflected.
A week of “Imagining Sanctuary” provided an opportunity to writers and readers, speakers and listeners, to imagine a place of sanctuary and dignity, in life and in death. In her poem The Towers of Silence, Mehta writes, “It is good, mother, to have a resting place for family, a spot to mourn the passing of the centuries… to remember.” For many in the DMV area, whose roots lead to all corners of the world, such a place may exist only in imagination. In her speech, Mehta referred to the Republic of Imagination, a phrase borrowed from the title of a book by Azar Nafisi, the inaugural guest of the Annual Cheuse Center Lecture series.
The festival’s theme of imagining places and ideas that inspire people to act in the face of injustice and to continue looking inward in search of the best in human nature will undoubtedly continue to manifest in the ongoing work of the Cheuse Center’s visiting writers and in its many other projects.
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Nikki Kazimova is a graduate teaching assistant in the MFA in Creative Writing program, with a concentration in nonfiction. In the Fall semester of 2026, she will be teaching the first-year English composition course at GMU. Nikki has a master’s degree in journalism from the University of Missouri-Columbia and a teaching certificate from Moreland University. She speaks several languages, with Russian and English being her fortes. Nikki is the author of Culture Smart – Azerbaijan guide published by the Kuperard publishers in London.