Events |PEN America World Voices Festival: Forced Journeys - Stories of Home, Displacement, and Belonging
Goethe-Institut Los Angeles | May 2, 2025
6.30 p.m. (PT) | Goethe-Institut Los Angeles
Join novelists Charmaine Craig, Ipek S. Burnett, Héctor Tobar, and photojournalist Lara Aburamadan at the Goethe-Institut Los Angeles for a conversation on Stories of Home, Displacement, and Belonging on the occasion of the PEN America World Voices Festival and Thomas Mann’s 150th birthday celebration.
What does it mean to belong to a place, a nation, a family, one’s own past? To what do we owe our homelands and what happens when we are displaced from them? Novelist Charmaine Craig, whose Burmese mother was both a beauty queen and a revolutionary, illuminates both national and personal trauma in her prize-winning Miss Burma; Héctor Tobar set his novel Tattooed Soldier in Los Angeles before the riots and in his parents’ native Guatemala during the years of military dictatorship. Photojournalist and founder of Refugee Eye,Lara Aburamadan recounts the ugliness of war and the endless cycle of Israeli bombardments in her native Gaza, in an effort to fight the dehumanization of Palestinians, bring about social change, and promote peace. In conversation with Ipek S. Burnett, a Turkish-born author and psychologist; these writers discuss in what ways exile gives them freedom to write, create, or advocate— and in what ways the draw of “home” limits that expression.
This event is presented by PEN America with Thomas Mann House and the Goethe-Institut in the spirit of Thomas Mann’s 150th birthday celebration, who wrote many of his most well-known works from his exile residence in Los Angeles.
The 2025 PEN World Voices Festival, the 20th anniversary of the festival, will be a celebration of world literature and free expression. Over four days, over 80 writers from nearly 30 countries will be featured in engaging talks, panels, readings, and performances in New York City and greater Los Angeles.
ASL interpretation is available for this event by request only. Please reach out to our Box Office team at publicprograms@pen.org by April 21st to request. Please ask a Box Office Attendant or festival representative upon arrival for directions to accessible seating if preferred.
For further information on accessibility in this space, or to make a request, please contact publicprograms@pen.org
Participants
Lara Aburamadan is a Palestinian visual artist, journalist and founder of Refugee Eye. Born and raised in Gaza City, now based in the San Francisco Bay Area, she tends to embrace the human perspective through visual storytelling. Her photographs and writings have been published in Time Magazine, New York Times, Washington Post, VICE, San Francisco Chronicle, and elsewhere. Lara has been chosen by Time Magazine among 34 women photojournalists around the world that you should follow their work in 2017.
Ipek S. Burnett, PhD, is a Turkish-American author and scholar who offers a psychological lens on social, cultural, and political issues. She is the author of A Jungian Inquiry into the American Psyche: The Violence of Innocence (2020) and the editor of Re-Visioning the American Psyche: Jungian, Archetypal, and Mythological Reflections (2024). Her forthcoming book, Art of Activism: A Psychological Perspective, explores the intersection of psychology, arts, and activism. A published novelist in Turkey, her literary work examines themes of free speech, democracy, and historical consciousness. Based in San Francisco, she serves as Co-Chair of the Human Rights Watch Executive Committee and is on the board of 826 Valencia, a nonprofit dedicated to supporting under-resourced students with their writing skills.
Héctor Tobar is a Los Angeles-born author of six books, including, most recently, Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of Latino, winner of the Kirkus Prize and other honors. His nonfiction Deep Down Dark was a New York Times bestseller and adapted into the film The 33. His novel The Barbarian Nurseries won the California Book Award Gold Medal and was a New York Times Notable Book. Tobar’s fiction has appeared in Best American Short Stories, and he earned his MFA from UC Irvine, where he is currently a professor. At the Los Angeles Times he was a foreign correspondent and was part of a reporting team that won a Pulitzer Prize. Tobar has been a Guggenheim fellow, a Harvard Radcliffe fellow, an op-ed writer for the New York Times, and a contributor to The New Yorker, National Geographic, and The New York Review of Books, among many other publications. He is the son of Guatemalan immigrants.
Charmaine Craig is the author of the novels Miss Burma, longlisted for the 2017 National Book Award for Fiction and the 2018 Women’s Prize for Fiction; My Nemesis; and The Good Men, a national bestseller. Her writing has been widely translated and appeared in venues including The New York Times Magazine, Narrative Magazine, AFAR, and Dissent. Formerly an actor in film and television, she studied literature at Harvard, received her MFA from UC Irvine, and serves as a faculty member in the Department of Creative Writing at UC Riverside.
This event is presented by PEN America, with the Goethe-Institut and Thomas Mann House Los Angeles in the spirit of Thomas Mann’s 150th birthday celebration, who wrote many of his most well-known works from his exile residence in Los Angeles.
