Join us as we celebrate the launch of Call Her Freedom by Tara Dorabji, How We Know Our Time Travelers by Anita Felicelli, and Too Soon by Betty Shamieh with a reading and conversation with Zara Houshmand! This event will include short readings, an exciting conversation between the authors and Zara Houshmand, and Q&A.
About Call Her Freedom: A sweeping family saga following one woman’s struggle to protect her culture and her family amidst the backdrop of a military occupation. Call Her Freedom is a love story that untangles family secrets and heals generational wounds, announcing Tara Dorabji as a thrilling new voice in fiction.
Tara Dorabji | Tara Dorabji is the author of the novel, Call Her Freedom, winner of the Simon & Schuster Books Like Us first novel contest. She is the daughter of Parsi-Indian and German-Italian migrants. Her documentary film series on human rights defenders in Kashmir won awards at over a dozen film festivals throughout Asia and the USA. Tara's publications include Al Jazeera, The Chicago Quarterly, Huizache, and acclaimed anthologies: Good Girls Marry Doctors & All the Women in My Family Sing. She lives in Northern California with her family and rabbit.
About How We Know Our Time Traveler is a dark, surreal, and atmospheric collection of 14 genre-bending stories that explore themes of reality, time, and love. Meet an uncanny crew: a bickering couple who use an app to track their fights, a woman who realizes that an unseen lodger is squatting in her home, a woman encounters a younger version of her husband, and a group of creepy friends sell jars of fog.
Anita Felicelli | Anita Felicelli is the author of the short story collection How We Know Our Time Travelers. Her other books include Chimerica: A Novel and the award-winning Love Songs for a Lost Continent. Anita edits Alta Journal‘s California Book Club. Anita has also contributed essays and criticism to the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Alta Journal, Slate, among other places. Her work has been recognized by the Greater Bay Area Journalism Awards and the Los Angeles Press Club. She served on the Board of the National Book Critics Circle from 2021-2024.
About Too Soon with biting hilarity, Too Soon introduces us to a trio of bold and unforgettable voices. This dramatic saga follows one family’s epic journey fleeing war-torn Jaffa in 1948, chasing the American Dream in Detroit and San Francisco in the sixties and seventies, hustling in the New York theatre scene post-9/11, and daring to stage a show in Palestine in 2012. Upon learning one of them is living on borrowed time, the three women fight to live, make art, and love on their own terms. A funny, sexy, and heart-wrenching literary debut, Too Soon illuminates our shared history and asks, how can we set ourselves free?
Betty Shamieh | Betty Shamieh (she/her) is a Palestinian American writer and the author of fifteen plays. She is the playwright-in-residence at the Classical Theatre of Harlem. Her six New York play premieres include the sold-out off-Broadway runs of Roar and Malvolio, a sequel to Twelfth Night, which were both New York Times Critic’s Picks. Shamieh was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and named a UNESCO Young Artist for Intercultural Dialogue. She is a founding artistic director of The Semitic Root, a collective that supports innovative theatre cocreated by Arab and Jewish Americans. A graduate of Harvard College and the Yale School of Drama, she lives with her family in San Francisco.
Zara Houshmand | Zara Houshmand is an Iranian American writer whose work includes poetry, theatre, literary translation, collaborative memoir, and creative nonfiction. She was a pioneer in the development of virtual reality as an art form and her VR installation Beyond Manzanar, with Tamiko Thiel, has been exhibited widely around the world and is in the permanent collection of the San Jose Museum of Art. For two decades she was publications director for the Mind & Life Institute, editing books on the Dalai Lama’s dialogues with Western scientists, and she has contributed to many other publications on Buddhism. Her theater work includes directing and designing as well as writing, with bilingual productions and award-winning translations of Bijan Mofid’s plays. Her most recent book is Moon and Sun, a bilingual edition of her translations of Rumi’s rubaiyat.