A Measure of Belonging Anthology Reading

 "A Measure Of Belonging"- Anthology Reading

 

Cinelle Barnes, Editor of A Measure of Belonging: Twenty-one Writers of Color on the New American South, joins Aruni Kashyap of Athens, GA, and Gary Jackson, of Charleston, SC, to discuss this new anthology.

Assembled by editor and essayist Cinelle Barnes, essays in A Measure of Belonging: Writers of Color on the New American South acknowledge that from the DMV to the college basketball court to doctors’ offices, there are no shortage of places of tension in the American South. Urgent, necessary, funny, and poignant, these essays from new and established voices confront the complexities of the South’s relationship with race, uncovering the particular difficulties and profound joys of being a Southerner in the 21st century.

Cinelle Barnes is a memoirist, essayist, and educator from Manila, Philippines, and is the author of Monsoon Mansion: A Memoir and Malaya: Essays On Freedom, and the editor of a forthcoming anthology of essays about the American South. She earned an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Converse College. Her writing has appeared in Buzzfeed Reader, Catapult, Literary Hub, Hyphen, Panorama: A Journal of Intelligent Travel, and South 85, among others. Her work has received fellowships and grants from VONA, Kundiman, the John and Susan Bennett Memorial Arts Fund, and the Lowcountry Quarterly Arts Grant. Her debut memoir was listed as a Best Nonfiction Book of 2018 by Bustle and nominated for the 2018 Reading Women Nonfiction Award. Barnes was a WILLA: Women Writing the American West Awards screener and a 2018-19 Scholastic Art & Writing Awards juror, and is the 2018-19 writer-in-residence at the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art in Charleston, SC, where she and her family live.

Aruni Kashyap is a writer, translator, and editor. Kashyap’s first novel, The House with a Thousand Stories was published to high critical acclaim. In the forthcoming edited anthology of short stories, How to Tell A Story About an Insurgency, he has put together fifteen short stories by various authors, stories that narrate life under militancy in Assam in a variety of styles, voices, and themes. As one of the best-known translators from the Assamese language, Kashyap has translated Indira Goswami’s novel The Bronze Sword of Thengphakhri Tehsildar. His current translation projects include Anuradha Sharma Pujari’s novel Hriday Ek Bigyapan, and a collection of short stories by Yeshe Dorje Thongchi: a writer from the Serdukpen tribe, from the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh. In addition to his English work, Kashyap writes regularly in his native Assamese language. His novel Noikhon Etia Duroit follows the life of an Indian immigrant student called Rajeev in the United States. The novel appeared periodically in the popular monthly magazine Satsori between January 2015 and January 2018 and found a wide readership much before its publication in book form. Four other novellas, Nodimukhee, Horokanto Bejor Montro Puthibur, and Samironor Pasot have appeared in various periodicals.

Born and raised in Topeka, Kansas, Gary Jackson is the author of the poetry collection Missing You, Metropolis, which received the 2009 Cave Canem Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared in numerous journals including Callaloo, The Sun, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Copper Nickel. He’s been published in Shattered: The Asian American Comics Anthology and was featured in the 2013 New American Poetry Series by the Poetry Society of America. He teaches in the MFA program as an associate professor at the College of Charleston.

This is the first in a new reading series called On My Mind, sponsored by the Georgia Center for the Book and Read SC - The South Carolina Center of the Book. This virtual reading is free and open to the public, but you must register on Eventbrite to receive the link to the Zoom webinar. Programs for the On My Mind reading series will be on the first Thursday of every month on Zoom and will feature writers from both Georgia and South Carolina.