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May 2005
Bringing authentic voices of city in their most honest form
By Jeff Syroney
As readers of this feature know, InkTank is committed to connecting people. One of the most important and largest ways we do that is through an annual event called Writers’ Weekend in Cincinnati. Three days of panel discussions, workshops, lectures and demonstrations from the area’s most knowledgeable and talented writers offered to the general public completely free. Working with our partners at the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County, we are proud to present this important tool that will help put Cincinnati on the map as a Literary Mecca. As we approach the biggest event that InkTank has ever undertaken in its short history, I thought it would be appropriate to introduce our keynote speaker, Diana Abu-Jaber. Diana Abu-Jaber was born in 1960 in Upstate New York and lived there until she was 7 when her family moved to Amman for two years. Her father is Jordanian and her mother is American, and she has lived between America and Jordan ever since. She received her doctorate in English literature from the State University of New York. She has taught literature and creative writing at the University of Michigan, the University of Oregon, and UCLA.
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Ms. Abu-Jaber is the author of Crescent, which was awarded the 2004 PEN Center USA Award for Literary Fiction and the Before Columbus Foundation's American Book Award and was named one of the twenty best novels of 2003 by The Christian Science Monitor, and Arabian Jazz, which won the 1994 Oregon Book Award and was nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award. She teaches at Portland State University and divides her time between Portland and Miami.
Her latest book is a memoir entitled The Language of Baklava in which she recounts the stories her father told her while she was growing up, which centered on cooking and eating but "turned out to be about something much larger: grace, difference, faith, love" |
She recently returned from Amman where she was on a Fulbright research grant award, conducting interviews with Jordanian and Palestinian women about their lives to develop background for her next novel Memories of Birth.
InkTank and The Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County are happy to announce renowned author Diana Abu-Jaber as the Keynote Speaker for Writers’ Weekend in Cincinnati running May 13-15, 2005. Ms. Abu-Jaber is scheduled to speak from 4:00 – 5:30pm in the Library’s Atrium on Saturday, May 14, 2005. For more information about Writers’ Weekend, please visit www.inktank.org. The following excerpt is from her latest novel, The Language of Baklava.
We also bring you the political poetry of local poet William K. Woods who appears in QCF Magazine often.
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