The Cheuse Center @ The Annapolis Book Festival

Cheuse Center director Matthew Davis will be moderating a conversation between four foreign writers as they look at the United States during this fascinating period in our history. The panel includes:

Leeya Mehta’s prize-winning poetry, fiction and non-fiction have been published in the US, UK and India. She is the winner of the 2016 Readers’ Choice Award from DistrictLit, a Finalist for the 18th Annual Arts and Letters Rumi Prize for Poetry and an International Publication Award in 2017-2018 with the Atlanta Review. She is the author of The Towers of Silence and an editor with Plume and Origins Journal. Leeya grew up in Mumbai and was a Radhakrishnan Scholar at Oxford University. After travels through the Arctic borderlands and Japan, she lives in Washington DC, a city that inspires her writing. She has just completed a novel set in Mumbai and Washington.

Roberto Brodsky was recently the cultural attaché at the Embassy of Chile. He has been a professional journalist for 30 years, and is the author of the novels Casa chilena, Veneno, Bosque quemado, and three other novels. Mr. Brodsky is also the co-author of three drama plays and the co-screenwriter of the films Machuca, El brindis and Mi vida con Carlos.

Nawaf Ashur Haskan is a Yazidi poet from Iraq currently based in the DC area, where he is a research fellow with National Endowment for Democracy. He is also an administrative consultant with Youth Bridges, an NGO based in Iraq. In 2016, Mr. Haskan worked as cultural advisor and translator for RYOT and the Huffington Post. From 2015 to 2016, he also served as a business development officer for the International Organization for Migration. Before graduating from the American University of Iraq–Sulaimani, Mr. Haskan founded several youth-based civic education initiatives where he sought to strengthen the principles of pluralism through regular workshops in local villages. From 2005 to 2008, he worked as an interpreter for U.S. Troops in Iraq. Mr. Haskan's work has appeared in the Iowa Review, and he has been featured in the New Yorker and Vogue.

Khet Mar is a a novelist, short story writer, poet, and essayist and currently works as a broadcast journalist at the Radio Free Asia Burmese Service in Washington, DC. Trained as a chemist, she embarked on a writing career and has published the novel Wild Snowy Night, four collections of short stories, three volumes of essays, and a Burmese translation of I Am Malala. Ms. Mar's works have been translated into Japanese, Spanish and English. She was a featured writer at the 2009 PEN World Voices Festival, and a writer-in-residence at the City of Asylum/Pittsburgh, which provides sanctuary to writers exiled under threat of severe persecution in their native countries. In 2007, she participated in the prestigious International Writing Program at the University of Iowa.