FEATURED EVENT
Becoming American with Eman Quotah, Nadia Hashimi, Mariam Thakkar, and Delegate Joseline A. Peña-Melnyk with curator Saima Adil Sitwat

LIVE (Wheeler Auditorium, 3rd floor) & VIRTUAL @ THE CENTRAL PRATT LIBRARY

CityLit Project joined author and curator Saima Adil Sitwat to present ‘Becoming American’, a series of short vignettes & videos of ten immigrant women who call Maryland home. This session engages a different assembly of women designed to speak authentically about their American experience. In American Muslim: An Immigrant’s Journey, Sitwat wrote of her own life in search of home and belonging, which prompted a desire to dismantle normalizing the trauma of those who undergo the process of migration. Joining her is bestselling novelist Nadia Hashimi whose novel Sparks Like Stars, speaks to returning “home” in Afghanistan to learn family truths, torn between reinvention and remembrance. Eman Quotah’s novel Bride of the Sea reveals the constraints of women, colliding cultures, and the life of a child torn between loved ones in two countries, Saudi Arabia and America. As a child, Maryland State Delegate Joseline A. Peña-Melnyk emigrated from the Dominican Republic to the U.S. with her single mother and sister. She has represented Prince George’s and Anne Arundel Counties as a state delegate for ten years and found her calling in working for the rights of people on the margins. Mariam Thakkar immigrated from India in 1984, and over the years of being an immigrant hijabi female business owner, and the mother of three daughters, she is committed to making room for other immigrants at every table where she has a seat.

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Please Note: Move your cursor over the bold print below and click, to access the Virtual link.
The LIVE Panel and Audience Q & A session (Wheeler Auditorium, 3rd floor) will also be broadcast on the Enoch Pratt Free Library Facebook page and YouTube page. It can be watched after the broadcast on the library’s Facebook Live. Click here for the Live video library.

If you cannot obtain a seat, you may watch the live stream of this event on your own device. The Pratt Library offers free wifi. We truly appreciate your grace and your patience as we navigate both a live and virtual experience for all.

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CityLit in partnership with Enoch Pratt Free Library, Maryland Centers for Creative Classrooms, Arts Education in Maryland Schools, Maryland Humanities, Greater Baltimore Cultural Alliance, National Endowment for the Arts – American Rescue Plan, Motor House, Busboys and Poets – Baltimore, Bmore Art and The Ivy Bookshop presents CityLit Festival: Reimagined II. This live and virtual celebration of the arts showcases a bevy of leading poets and writers throughout March, with a day full of sessions on March 12th. We’re talking fiction, nonfiction, poetry galore, and ways to up the ante on your craft.

Download the CityLit Festival: Reimagined II flyer.