IMAGINE! Sonali Samarasinghe and Heather E. Murray in conversation
Saturday, October 31, 1:30–3 p.m.
Buffalo Street Books, Dewitt Mall, Ithaca
Free and open to the public

Join Sri Lankan human rights activist, poet, fiction writer, memoirist, and journalist Sonali Samarasinghe and First Amendment specialist and civil rights attorney Heather E. Murray for the third part of IMAGINE!, a series of dialogues on the power of imagination as a public good. Jason Freitag, professor of South Asian History at Ithaca College and chair of the Advisory Board of Ithaca City of Asylum, will moderate.

The IMAGINE! series celebrates the 25th anniversary of Ithaca City of Asylum, which provides refuge in Ithaca for writers and artists who can no longer work in safety in their home countries. Each dialogue invites a former program participant and one or more local residents working creatively in other fields to share their perspectives on making art, exercising rights, and imagining a better world for all.

Sonali Samarasinghe worked as a human rights lawyer during Sri Lanka’s civil war before becoming an investigative reporter for a major opposition newspaper. She fled the country after the paper’s editor (and her husband) was assassinated. She was Ithaca City of Asylum’s writer-in-residence from 2012 to 2014.

Among her many awards include the Hellmann Hammett Award for persecuted journalists, the Images and Voices of Hope Award for Print and Digital Journalism, PEN International’s Oxfam Novib/PEN Award for Freedom of Expression, the Global Shining Light Award for Investigative Journalism by the Global Investigative Journalism Conference, and Zonta International’s Woman of Achievement.

Heather E. Murray is the Associate Director of the Cornell Law School First Amendment Clinic and the Managing Attorney of the Clinic’s Local Journalism Project. She began her career as a journalist in New Jersey and continues to work with local journalists on free speech cases. She is a member of the advisory committee of ProJourn, a pro bono initiative for journalists that is housed at the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.

Admission is free and open to the public but donations will be gladly accepted. Ithaca City of Asylum is a project of the nonprofit Center for Transformative Action.