Drawing Our Own Maps

Shailja Patel &

Robert B. Caldwell, Jr.

Uzma Aslam Khan

Celebrating the U.S. publication of her new novel, The Miraculous True History of Nomi Ali

Shailja Patel

Shailja Patel, queer radical internationalist feminist from Kenya, is the author of Migritude, which was a #1 Amazon poetry bestseller, Seattle Times bestseller, and shortlisted for Italy's Camaiore Prize. Migritude is taught in over 150 colleges and universities worldwide. Migritude is based on Patel's highly-acclaimed one-woman theatre show, which generated standing ovations on four continents.

Patel's poems have been translated into 17 languages. Her essays and commentaries appear in the Guardian, Le Monde Diplomatique, and Internazionale, among others. She has appeared on BBC, Al-Jazeera, and NPR. Honors include a Sundance Theatre Fellowship, the Voices of Our Nations poetry award, the Fanny-Ann Eddy Poetry Award, the BrittlePaper Anniversary Award, the Nordic Africa Institute African Writer Fellowship, and Jozi Book Fair Guest Writer Award.

Patel is a founding member of Kenyans For Peace, Truth and Justice, a civil society coalition which works for an equitable democracy in Kenya. The African Women's Development Fund named her one of Fifty Inspirational African Feminists, ELLE India Magazine selected her as one of its 25 New Guard Influencers, and Poetry Africa honored her as Letters To Dennis Poet, continuing the legacy of renowned anti-apartheid activist poet Dennis Brutus. She represented Kenya at the London Cultural Olympiad's Poetry Parnassus. Her work currently features in the Smithsonian Museum's groundbreaking "Beyond Bollywood" exhibition.

The Nobel Women’s Initiative honored Patel with a Global Feminist Spotlight in 2019. She is currently a Civitella Ranieri 2021-23 Fellow, and a Research Associate at Five College Women’s Studies Research Center, working on African feminisms and climate justice.

Follow her on twitter: @shailjapatel

Robert Caldwell, Jr.

Robert B. Caldwell Jr., visiting assistant professor of Native American and Indigenous studies, received his B.A. from the University of New Orleans, an M.S. in labor studies from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and M.A. in heritage resources from Northwestern State University of Louisiana and a Ph.D. in history from the University of Texas at Arlington. He is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.

His wide-ranging interests include transnational history, foodways, migration history, resistance and revolutions, historical geography, cartography, and the history of exploration and "discoveries." His dissertation focused on thematic maps of American Indian homelands, languages and culture areas. He is revising the manuscript for publication with the University of Nebraska Press.

Website: https://robertbcaldwell.com/

Uzma Aslam Khan

Uzma Aslam Khan, associate professor of fiction writing, is the prize-winning author of five novels published worldwide to critical acclaim. These include Trespassing, translated in 18 languages and recipient of a Commonwealth Prize nomination; The Geometry of God, a Kirkus Reviews' Best Book of 2009; Thinner Than Skin, nominated for the Man Asian Literary Prize and DSC Prize for South Asian Literature, and winner of the French Embassy Prize for Best Fiction at the Karachi Literature Festival 2014. Her short fiction has twice won a Zoetrope: All Story Short Fiction Prize, and appeared in Granta, The Massachusetts Review, Nimrod International Journal, AGNI, and Calyx: A Journal of Art and Literature by Women. Her non-fiction has appeared in the Guardian, Counterpunch, Drawbridge, Herald and Dawn, among other national and international periodicals, on topics that include feminism, imperialism, racism and Islamophobia, particularly in representations of Muslim women.

The daughter of refugees of the 1947 Partition, Khan was born in Lahore, Pakistan, and grew up in Karachi, during the US-backed military regime of General Zia that further displaced refugee and Indigenous communities. Her own childhood too was uprooted; in addition to Pakistan, she lived in the Philippines, Japan, and England.

Khan’s new novel, The Miraculous True History of Nomi Ali, explores the impact of colonialism and war on displaced communities like (and unlike) her own. Set in the British penal settlement of the Andaman Islands during the 1930s, through the Japanese occupation during the Second World War, the book, twenty-seven years in the making, writes into being the stories of those caught in the vortex of history, yet written out of it. Central to the novel, then, are questions of whose histories we believe, elevate, celebrate—and whose we erase. The Miraculous True History of Nomi Ali won the 9th UBL Literary Awards English Language Fiction category 2020 as well as the Karachi Literature Festival-Getz Pharma Fiction Prize 2021. Recently out in Sweden, Nomi will be simultaneously released in the US and UK in April 2022.

Website: https://www.uzmaaslamkhan.com