Event: Celebrating Outside Women by Roohi Choudhry
This Saturday, April 26, I will be in conversation with Roohi Choudhry, Yashica Dutt, and Pyaari Azzadi in celebration of the publication of Roohi’s debut novel Outside Women. We will reflect on the themes of Outside Women—finding courage in sisterhood, defying silence across generations, and the revolutionary possibilities of standing together.
Our conversation, sponsored by the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, starts at 6pm and will be hosted by Pyaari Azaadi at her studio Xenana Projects, 154 Scott Avenue, Studio 317, Brooklyn New York, 11237. It is free to attend.
About Outside Women
Would you risk your own life to pursue justice for a stranger? Two migrant women—separated by geographies and generations—face this same devastating choice.
Lured away from her home in 1890s India, Sita is brought to South Africa as an indentured servant—one among millions funneled by the British to replace the recently abolished slave trade. One hundred years later, Hajra, a Pakistani scholar, is forced to flee to New York City from her home in Peshawar after witnessing a violent act meant to target her. She loses herself in academic research until she comes face-to-face with a photo of a laughing, defiant young woman brandishing a banner in protest. Inexorably drawn to this woman, Hajra travels to South Africa to learn more and unknowingly traces Sita's path.
With raw imagery and rich sensory detail, Roohi Choudhry's incandescent debut novel Outside Women intertwines the narratives of two women painfully yet valiantly carving their existences outside of patriarchal and colonial spaces as they search for kinship and strength in solidarity.
About the author
Roohi Choudhry was born in Pakistan and grew up in southern Africa. She holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Michigan and is the recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship and residencies at Hedgebrook and Djerassi. She worked as a researcher in criminal justice reform and public health, wrote for the United Nations, and facilitates creative writing workshops for interfaith groups, schools, libraries, and community organizations. Her stories and essays have appeared in Ploughshares, Callaloo, Longreads, and the Kenyon Review. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Find out more at roohichoudhry.com.
About Yashica Dutt
Award-winning author of Coming Out as Dalit, Dutt is an internationally acclaimed Dalit journalist and among the most recognized global voices on caste. Dutt's work has been published in the New York Times, Foreign Policy, and the Atlantic; and she has been featured on the BBC, the Guardian, and PBS NewsHour.
Coming Out as Dalit, which was published in the South Asian subcontinent in 2019, quickly became a bestseller and is currently part of the curriculum in over 50 colleges and universities worldwide, including Harvard University, UC Berkeley, and UC Davis.
Dutt was involved in the passing of the historic anti-caste bill in the city of Seattle and her writing has been instrumental in shaping the text of the first-in-nation law. Dutt is currently working on her second book on caste in the United States, also commissioned by Beacon Press. She graduated from Columbia Journalism School and lives in Brooklyn.
Mona Eltahawy is a feminist author, commentator and disruptor of patriarchy. Her new book, an anthology on menopause called Bloody Hell!: Adventures in Menopause from Around the World, has just been published. Her first book Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution (2015) targeted patriarchy in the Middle East and North Africa and her second The Seven Necessary Sins For Women and Girls (2019) took her disruption worldwide. It is now available in Ireland and the UK. Her commentary has appeared in media around the world and she makes video essays and writes a newsletter as FEMINIST GIANT.
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