The Cheuse Center presents Annapolis Book Festival Panel Discussion: The International Political Writer
Saturday, May 3, 2025 11:00 AM to 12:00 PM EDT
Exploring themes of artistic freedom, book banning, war, and exile, three DMV writer-activists read from their latest books and discuss bringing international writers to audiences in America.
Featured Books and Authors
Joanne Leedom-Ackerman
Far from the Desert (2024), a novel by Joanne Leedom-Ackerman
Ena Selimović
Underground Barbie (2025), a novel by Maša Kolanović, tr. by Ena Selimovic
Katherine E Young
People and Trees (2024), a novel by Akram Aylisli, tr. by Katherine E. Young
Moderator
Leeya Mehta
Director, Alan Cheuse International Writers Center
More About Panelists
Joanne Leedom-Ackerman is the author of international political thrillers, including The Far Side of the Desert, Burning Distance, The Dark Path to the River and short story collection No Marble Angels. Her nonfiction includes PEN Journeys: Memoir of Literature on the Line, and she is senior editor of The Journey of Liu Xiaobo: From Dark Horse to Nobel Laureate. Former reporter for The Christian Science Monitor, Joanne is Vice President of PEN International and serves on the boards of the American Writers Museum and Words Without Borders and is an emeritus board member of Refugees International, Poets and Writers, the PEN Faulkner Foundation, Human Rights Watch, Brown University, and Johns Hopkins University.
Ena Selimović is a translator, writer, and co-founder of Turkoslavia, a translation collective and journal. Her work has appeared in Words Without Borders, The Paris Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, World Literature Today, and others. She holds a Ph.D. in comparative literature from Washington University in St. Louis. Maša Kolanović is the author of the poetry collection Leeches for the Lonely, the novel Underground Barbie, the prose poem Jamerika, and the short story collection Dear Pests and Other Creepy Stories. The latter received the 2020 EU Prize for Literature, the Pula Book Fair Audience Award, and the Vladimir Nazor Prize for Literature.
Katherine E. Young is the author of two poetry collections, Day of the Border Guards and Woman Drinking Absinthe, and editor of Written in Arlington. Her translations of Azerbaijani, Kazakh, Russian, and Ukrainian writers have received international recognition. From 2016-2018, she served as the inaugural Poet Laureate of Arlington, VA. Young is the translator of People and Trees, Stone Dreams, and Farewell, Aylis by Azerbaijani novelist, playwright, editor, and Nobel Peace Prize nominee Akram Aylisli, whose books were burned in Azerbaijan in 2013. Since 2016, Aylisli has lived under de facto house arrest in Baku, Azerbaijan.
