Ithaca City of Asylum

A play, “Rat-tat-tat,” by David Guaspari, is featured in The Best Ten-Minute Plays 2013, edited by Lawrence Harbison, published by Smith and Kraus.  It’s just come out.

Christopher Gonzales won the 2014 S. I. Newhouse School Prize for Creative Nonfiction for his piece, “Mother, Father, Memory, Me.” The story appears in Stone Canoe 8, released in January.

Ithaca City of Asylum joined fifty other local non-profit organizations at the Ithaca Alternative Gift Fair on December 7, 2013,  at the First Presbyterian Church at Dewitt Park. During the fair, participants had the chance to donate a gift to a charity in honor of a loved one—the perfect gift for the person on your list who already had all the material goods he or she might want. When you made a donation to ICOA, you received a lovely Acorn Design holiday card with an insert explaining your gift to the recipient.

ICOA’s table at the 2013 Alternative Gift Fair

Sonali Samarasinghe, Ithaca City of Asylum’s writer in residence, is the focus of a front page interview in the Ithaca Journal. The story describes Sonali as an award-winning investigative journalist, editor, and lawyer from Sri Lanka who worked for more than two decades fighting for justice in her country and exposing government corruption. The wide-ranging interview covers her work in Sri Lanka, her need to flee her home country, and her life now in Ithaca as a scholar in residence at Ithaca College. The full interview, including a video of Sonali, can be found here.

Ithaca City of Asylum board member, Lamar Herrin, has recently published his latest book, Fractures. This is a novel that uses the issue of hyrofracking to provide the context for a story about family and connections. Herrin, a professor emeritus of creative writing and contemporary literature at Cornell University, talks about his new work with fellow board member Barbara Adams in an interview published in the Ithaca Journal.

As part of the discussion, the author talks about the location of the novel and the use of hydrofracking. “I’m a writer for whom place is very important. If you write about a place, you preserve it. One of the reasons writers write is to hold onto things, so things don’t vanish out from under them. So I did feel the need to write about Ithaca. I love this place, and I realized it was time to write about it. And the issue that was pushing itself in my face was hydrofracking.

It’s a provocative social issue that has to do with land, water, the air we breathe. These are the kind of issues novelists go for — the more basic and elemental, the more wide-reaching the book is going to be. The big problem was dealing with hydrofracking in a non-polemical way. I struggled to suppress my own personal feelings about the wisdom of fracking in the service of a novel and characters who are responding to it differently. All the characters, absolutely every one, has mixed feelings about whether to drill or not; none is a clear advocate or opponent of it.”

Fractures is an intense family drama, and nothing is more personal or family-oriented than the land. And this is family land.

The full interview is available here.

The Park Foundation has announced a grant of $10,000 to Ithaca City of Asylum, to be used to fund the organization’s activities in the next two years.

“We are deeply grateful to the Park Foundation for this new commitment,” says Bridget Meeds, ICOA chair. “The foundation was our first funder to step forward in 2001 as we began our work, and has provided funding continuously to ICOA since then. Their support has made our work possible.”

ICOA is pleased to announce that former writer in residence Sarah Mkhonza has joined the faculty of Stanford University, where she will teach courses in Zulu and Xhosa.

ICOA is pleased to invite you to an art show at the Tompkins County Public Library, featuring art based on Banned Books. The exhibition is available until December 20, 2013 and contains work by two Ithaca City of Asylum board members–Bridget Meeds and Kenny Berkowitz. 

Exiled Venezuelan Author Reads from Dystopian Novel for Voices of Freedom 2013

Venezuelan political critic and renowned author Israel Centeno read from his novel La Torre Invertida, (translated as The Tower Overturned) as the highlight of Ithaca City of Asylum’s Voices of Freedom 2013. The novel is about the unraveling of a city where dystopia becomes its citizens’ harsh reality. Centeno’s talk began at 2:00 P.M. on Sunday, September 29, in the Tompkins County Public Library’s BorgWarner Community Room.

“In Venezuela,” Centeno says, “the independent journalist is constantly threatened with prison, demands, and the so-called ‘ire of the people’.” In such a world, fiction is an alternative for the expression of social criticism and a call for change.

A theme in The Tower Overturned is how rats and “man-rats,” are signs of corruption in society. “The rats are mutants,” Centeno continues. “We have a crowd. Half are some kind of gothic homeless and half are rat-men. They play a game between the towers, symbols of modernity. The game is a sort of Maya ball game that ends in sacrifice. The fight begins to turn against the corrupt bureaucrats and the powerful leaders themselves.”

Israel Centeno

Centeno is the author of poetry, short stories, and novels and is regarded as one of the most important Venezuelan literary figures of the past fifty years. He has won numerous awards, including the Federico Garcia Lorca Award in Spain and the National Council of Culture Award in Venezuela in 1991. Born in 1958 in Caracas, Venezuela, he is currently living in the United States as an exile from his native country. Centeno has been the writer-in-residence at the City of Asylum/Pittsburgh since 2011. Displaced under the presidency of Hugo Chavez, he has just published his tenth book, Bamboo City (Wild Age Press, 2012), his first in English. Unlike magical realism of Latin American novels of the 20th century, Centeno describes his work as “distorted realism about a distorted realm,” drawing from popular forms such as vampire novels, Gothic fiction, and absurdism.

As part of the program, Ithaca City of Asylum’s resident writer, Sonali Samarasinghe, exiled from Sri Lanka and presently an international visiting scholar at Ithaca College, read a brief excerpt from her memoir-in-progress. Pablo Cohen, head of the classical guitar program and a faculty member in the Latin American Studies program at Ithaca College, performed regional music.

“Voices of Freedom” is an annual event of Ithaca City of Asylum (ICOA) and is presented this year in partnership with the Tompkins County Public Library as part of Banned Books/Freedom to Read Week. This event is made possible with grant support from the Community Arts Partnership. Additional funding is provided by Poets & Writers, Inc. with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature. Co-sponsors include Amnesty International group 73 Ithaca, and Cornell University’s Carl L. Becker House, Department of Romance Studies, Latin American Studies Program, Rose Goldsen Lecture Series Fund, and the Society for the Humanities.

ICOA is a project of the Center for Transformative Action, a non-profit organization affiliated with Cornell University, and works in partnership with Cornell, Ithaca College, and Wells College.

Sonali Samarasinghe, Ithaca City of Asylum’s resident writer, was selected to give the commencement address at The Ellis School in Pittsburgh on June 6, 2013. The Ellis School is Pittsburgh’s only independent school dedicated to the education of girls and young women from age three through grade twelve.

During Samarasinghe’s talk to the graduates and their friends and families, she congratulated the graduating students while also encouraging them to support the universal human right of education for girls all over the world.

“As you go forth into your future, holding hope in one hand, and infinite possibility in the other, I  urge you, to give pause, and be thoughtful, of the struggles of women and girls everywhere.”

She told them the story of Malala, a Pakistani teenager who was shot for advocating for the education of girls, and also shared her own story of  bravery in the face of oppression in Sri Lanka. In conclusion, she urged the graduates to go forth into the world to serve others with courage and empathy. “It is my hope, that whatever life may fling at you along the way, you will be defined, not by how hard you fell down, but by how courageously you picked yourself up, and by how readily you extended a hand to others, to raise them to their feet, once again.”

Samarasinghe is an award-winning journalist and human rights activist. She practiced law in Sri Lanka for twenty years and worked as a journalist focusing on human rights, including government corruption and women’s issues. Currently, in addition to being ICOA’s writer-in-residence, she is also a visiting scholar in residence within the Honors Program at Ithaca College’s School of Humanities and Sciences. Samarasinghe is working on a book about her experiences in Sri Lankan politics and media.