Student Tribune
The Institute for the Humanities Presents The Arts of Asylum
On September 16, 2021 (5:00-6:15 pm), MCC’s Institute for the
Humanities and SUNY Geneseo’s Center for Integrative Learning will
present Writing in the Cities of Asylum, the first of our three-part
virtual series, The Arts of Asylum:
Strengthening Community by Building a City of Asylum in Rochester. All
events are free and open to the public.
For this first installment, Alison Meyers, Executive Director of
Rochester’s Writers and Books, will sit down with exiled Bengali poet,
activist, and political columnist Tuhin Das to discuss
his journey from being the target of fundamentalist groups in his native
Bangladesh to a writer in residence at City of Asylum Pittsburgh.
In 2004, City of Asylum/Pittsburgh opened with a mission: to provide
sanctuary to literary writers who were exiled and under threat of persecution.
Since then, this fertile organization has grown and enriched the entire
Pittsburgh community. Through its public arts programming, bookstore featuring
works in translation, neighborhood restaurant, and houses for use by writers
and artists-in-exile—each with a text-based artwork on the
façade—City of Asylum/Pittsburgh has become a hub for artistic and
community partnerships that express humanity’s best creative impulses.
It’s “a place where Pittsburgh meets the world and the world meets
Pittsburgh.”
Arts of Asylum series, a virtual, interactive forum, features distinguished
writers, musicians, and artists along with community partners serving refugee
and asylum-seeking populations to:
- Raise awareness about the City of Asylum network,
- Help create a new City of Asylum/Rochester as the fifth U.S. City
of Asylum location, and
- Explore how the City of Asylum/Rochester will engage in creative
placemaking to support local communities.
Please save the date, REGISTER HERE for the first forum (to receive the Zoom link), and visit
the Arts of Asylum
webpage for more information on this and future events.
Jacobs, Michael
Humanities & Social Sciences
08/30/2021