EventsThe New Social Environment#117
Aarti Shahani with Rev. Dr. Donna Schaper
Thursday, August 27, 2020 1 p.m. Eastern / 10 a.m. Pacific
These free events are produced by The Brooklyn Rail.
Award-winning journalist and author Aarti Shahani will join Rev. Dr. Donna Schaper for a conversation on Shahani’s experience growing up as an undocumented child in America, and the issue of immigration and beyond in our country. We’ll conclude with a poetry reading from Ed Foster.
In this Talk
Aarti Shahani
Aarti Shahani is an award-winning journalist and author. She spent her twenties organizing prisoners. Then she pivoted to business journalism and enjoyed a meteoric rise at NPR, as Silicon Valley correspondent. Her first book, Here We Are: American Dreams, American Nightmares (Celadon Books, 2019), a tragic comedy about growing up migrant in America. Aarti’s reporting has received awards from the Society of Professional Journalists, a regional Edward R. Murrow Award, and an Investigative Reporters & Editors Award. Aarti lives in Oakland, California with her nephew. She loves storytelling and justice.
Rev. Dr. Donna Schaper
Community builder Rev. Dr. Donna Schaper served as Senior Minister of Judson Memorial Church from 2006 to 2021. She was formerly at Coral Gables Congregational Church in Miami and before that at Yale University, and teaches leadership at the Hartford Seminary. As an elder, she is passionately concerned about leaving the next generation well-prepared for all they have to face. She has written over 35 books including Approaching End of Life: A Practical and Spiritual Guide (2015), Grace at Table: Small Spiritual Solutions to Large Material Problems, Solving Everything (2013), to her most recent book I Heart Francis: Letters to the Pope from an Unlikely Admirer (2016), among many others. She is an Editor-at-Large at the Rail.
The Rail has a tradition of ending our conversations with a poetry reading, and we're fortunate to have Dao Strom reading.
Dao Strom
Artist Dao Strom works with three “voices”—written, sung, visual—to explore hybridity and the intersection of personal and collective histories. She is the author of Instrument (Fonograf Editions, 2020) and its musical companion Traveler’s Ode (Antiquated Future Records, 2020); a bilingual poetry-art book, You Will Always Be Someone From Somewhere Else (AJAR Press); a memoir, We Were Meant To Be a Gentle People, and song cycle, East/West; and two books of fiction, The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys and Grass Roof, Tin Roof. Born in Vietnam, Strom grew up in the Sierra Nevada foothills of California and lives in Portland, Oregon. She is co-founder of two collective art projects, She Who Has No Master(s), and De-Canon.
We’d like to thank The Marion Boulton Kippy Stroud Foundation and Teiger Foundation for making these conversations possible, and for their support of our growing archive 🌈✨