Gallery: U.S. Embassy hosts writers in Eastleigh and Dadaab

The U.S. Embassy’s Somalia Unit hosted a reading and lecture tour, under the auspices of University of Iowa’s International Writing Program. Tour participants conducted workshops with Somali youth in Nairobi and in the Dadaab refugee camps from June 9-18, 2009. Four distinguished writers – Christopher Merrill, Eliot Weinberger, Terese Svoboda, and Tom Sleigh – conducted a workshop in Eastleigh, then spent three days in Dadaab, where they visited all three camps and reached nearly 200 young people.

Refugee Registration Camp Housing
Ifo Camp Poet Teacher Reads
Student Reads from Work Writers Terese Svoboda, Tom Sleigh, Chris Merrill and Eliot Weinberger conduct a workshop with youth in Dadaab.
Eliot Weinberger Tom Sleigh with Sudents
Writers in a Café

Happening Now

  • A fall harvest of book reviews coming in: of The Others by Sarah BLAU (translated from the Hebrew by Daniella Zamir); of LO Yi-Chin’s Farewell, translated from the Chinese by Jeremy TIANG; of Véronique TADJO’s In the Company of Men…

  • A fascinating interview with IWP’s Senior Advisor, professor Peter Nazareth, retired from UI’s English Department in spring 2021, after nearly five decades of teaching.

  • Word reaches us that poet HU Xudong  胡续冬, who also taught comparative and world literatures at Peking University (Beida), specializing in Latin American literatures, passed away unexpectedly. RIP, Hu Xudong…

  • We note with sadness the passing of Hiroshi SAKAGAMI 坂上 弘, whose long novelistic career garnered him major literary and cultural honors. A former president of the Japan Writers’ Association, he was until his retirement also the director of Keio University Press.

  • The poetic documentary Songs Still Sung: Voices from the Tsunami Shores, written and co-produced by Takako ARAI and creatively subtitled into English by a class of UI students of Japanese, will be screened at the prestigious Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival, on-line 10/7-14/2021.

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