The Politics of Home: Lina Meruane and Nadia Owusu in Conversation

Lina Meruane is an award-winning Chilean writer and scholar. She has published two collections of short stories and five novels. Translated by Megan McDowell into English are her latest: Seeing Red (Deep Vellum & Atlantic) and Nervous System (Graywolf & Atlantic). Meruane has written several non-fiction books, among which is her memoir Becoming Palestine and her essay on the impact and representation of the AIDS epidemic in Latin American literature, Viral Voyages (Palgrave MacMillan). She received the prestigious Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Novel Prize (Mexico 2012), the Anna Seghers Prize (Germany, 2011) as well as grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and a DAAD Writer in Residence in Berlin, and the Casa Cien Años de Soledad (Mexico 2021), among others. She currently teaches Global Cultures and Creative Writing at New York University.

Nadia Owusu is a Ghanaian and Armenian-American writer and urbanist. Her first book, Aftershocks,  topped many most-anticipated and best book of the year lists, including The New York Times, The Oprah Magazine, Vogue, TIME, Vulture, and the BBC. It was a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice. Nadia is the recipient of a 2019 Whiting Award. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The New York Times, Orion, Granta, The Paris Review Daily, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, Slate, Bon Appétit, Travel + Leisure, and others. By day, Nadia is Director of Storytelling at Frontline Solutions, a Black-owned consulting firm working for justice and liberation in partnership with philanthropic and nonprofit organizations. She teaches creative writing at the Mountainview MFA program and lives in Brooklyn, New York.

This conversation will be co-moderated by Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi, Associate Professor of English in Creative Writing, and Atalia Omer, Professor of Religion, Conflict, and Peace Studies at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies and at the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame.