We regret to inform you that due to the ongoing Franklin fire in Malibu, we decided to cancel the event with Sharon Dodua Otoo and Robert Blankenship scheduled for tomorrow, Thursday, December 12th.

While Villa Aurora is not directly impacted by the fire at this time, our location is in close proximity to the evacuation zone and the safety risks make it unfeasible to proceed with the event as planned.

However, Sharon Dodua Otoo and Robert Blankenship will still hold their conversation, which will be recorded and uploaded to our YouTube channel at a later date.

We apologize for the inconvenience and hope to see you soon at one of our next events!

Sharon Dodua Otoo is a novelist and political activist. Otoo won the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize in 2016 with the text Herr Gröttrup setzt sich hin. Her first novel Adas Raum was published by S. Fischer Verlag in 2021 and has been translated into several languages, including two English language versions Ada's Realm (MacLehose Press, 2023) and Ada's Room (Riverhead Books, 2023). In collaboration with the Ruhrfestspiele, one of the oldest, largest and most renowned theatre festivals in Europe, she curates the Black German-language literature festival "Resonanzen".

Robert Blankenship is Associate Professor of German at California State University, Long Beach, where he is program director and graduate advisor for German and teaches courses on topics such as the literature of divided Germany; contemporary German literature; German cinema; and Marx, Nietzsche, Freud. He is author of the monograph Suicide in East German Literature: Fiction, Rhetoric, and the Self-Destruction of Literary Heritage and is currently working on a second book tentatively titled Construing Christa Wolf: Critical and Creative Responses. At CSULB, he also directs the Christa Wolf Lab, which is a collective of radical readers who mine the works of Wolf for inspiration regarding collaborative reading practices.