Kerri Arsenault, John Freeman, Emily Raboteau (2017)

As the refugee crisis convulses whole swathes of the world and there are daily updates about the rise of homelessness in parts of America, the idea and meaning of home is at the forefront of many people’s minds. With John Freeman, Emily Raboteau, and Kerri Arsenault.

Kerri Arsenault is a writer, editor, photographer, and National Book Critics Circle Board member. Her writings have appeared in Freeman’s, Kirkus Reviews, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, and other publications. She is also a columnist at Lithub.com and Editor for Jewels of the North Atlantic (coming soon). She received her MFA in Creative Writing (Nonfiction) in 2015 from The New School and previously studied in the Master programme in Communication for Development, Malmö University, Sweden, an interdisciplinary program analyzing the interplay between politics, media, information and communication technology, international development, diversity, conflict resolution, and theories of social change within the context of globalization. Her book, What Remains, focuses on social and environmental justice, the consequences of globalization, and what happened to the working class in America.

John Freeman is the editor of Freeman’s, a literary biannual of new writing, and executive editor of Lit Hub. His books include “How to Read a Novelist” and “The Tyranny of E-mail,” as well as “Tales of Two Cities,” an anthology of new writing about inequality in New York City today. “Maps,” a collection of poems, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press. His work has been translated into more than twenty languages and has appeared in “The New Yorker,” “The Paris Review,” and “The New York Times.” The former editor of Granta, he teaches writing at The New School and is Writer in Residence at New York University.

Emily Raboteau is the author of a novel, The Professor’s Daughter and a work of creative nonfiction, Searching for Zion, named a best book of 2013 by The Huffington Post and The San Francisco Chronicle, a finalist for the Hurston Wright Legacy Award, grand prize winner of the New York Book Festival, and winner of a 2014 American Book Award. Raboteau’s fiction and essays have been widely published and anthologized in Best American Short Stories, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Tin House, Buzzfeed, Literary Hub, The Guardian, Guernica, VQR, The Believer, Salon, and elsewhere. Honors include a Pushcart Prize, The Chicago Tribune’s Nelson Algren Award, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Lannan Foundation, and the MacDowell Colony. An avid world traveler, she resides in New York City and teaches creative writing in Harlem at City College, once known as “the poor man’s Harvard.”

Recorded at Brooks Memorial Library on October 15, 2017 by Maria Dominguez.