Art by Jin Suk
The Launch of Proximity: A Portfolio of Writing and Art by Women of Color
Join us for the VIRTUAL LAUNCH of Proximity: A Portfolio of Writing and Art by Women of Color.
Saturday, November 7th, 2026, at 12:00 p.m. Eastern
Register to join ON ZOOM: https://tls-proximity.eventbrite.com
Join AGNI and the Transnational Literature Series at Brookline Booksmith for a virtual event to honor the release of Proximity: An AGNI Portfolio of Writing and Art by Women of Color. Coeditors Shuchi Saraswat, Ru Freeman, and Preti Taneja will be joined by contributors Catherine Bai, Deepa Bhasthi, Leila Farjami, Lola Flash, and Nathalie Handal.
The print-and-online portfolio gathers women writers and artists of color from around the world who are committed to using their voices, through written or visual art, to excavate and interrogate our connections within the systems of power that affect us all, both globally and at home. The portfolio’s editors selected fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and visual art that is fearless and unapologetic and inspires us to center a radical new canon.
Fiction by Ibtisam Azem / Catherine Bai / Choi Eunyoung / Wiam El-Tamami & Vidhi Doshi / Karthika Nair / Verdell Walker / Molara Wood Poetry by Hala Alyan / Shlagha Borah / Christiana Castillo / .CHISARAOKWU. / Sophia Chong / Suharshani Dharmarathna / Leila Farjami / Haleh Liza Gafori / Sadaf Halai / Nathalie Handal / Stephanie Isan / Siobhan Jean/Charles / Seema Jilani / Bhanu Kapil / Sabina Khan-Ibarra / Gabriela Mayes / Sydney Mayes / Porsha Olayiwola / Tracy K. Smith / Sharmaine Sun Nonfiction by Deepa Bhasthi/ Nahil Mohana / Leila Christine Nadir / Emma Ramadan Hybrid by Noor Al-Samarrai / Areej Ashhab Translations by Subhashini Malika Dharmarathna / Katharine Halls / Mayada Ibrahim / Sung Ryu Art by Samira Abbassy / Lola Flash / Sofia Karim / Jasleen Kaur
About the event’s featured contributors:
Catherine Bai is a Chinese American writer. Her fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in West Branch, Pleiades, and Best Debut Short Stories. Her poetry has appeared in Luna Luna Magazine and The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts. She has received support from Vermont Studio Center, the Periplus Collective, the Café Royal Cultural Foundation, and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico.
Deepa Bhasthi is a writer and International Booker Prize–winning literary translator. Her fiction, essays, columns, and journalism have been published extensively in Indian and international publications, anthologies, and visual art book projects. She is the author of a children’s book titled Champi and the Fig Tree, which has been translated into thirteen languages. Her published book-length translations from Kannada include works by Kota Shivarama Karanth, Kodagina Gouramma, and Banu Mushtaq. She was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist and is a recipient of grants and awards from English PEN, SALT Chicago, and several other organizations. She lives and works in Kodagu, in southern India.
Leila Farjami, an Iranian-American poet, translator, and psychotherapist, is the author of Daughter of Salt. Her poems have appeared in Ploughshares, the Iowa Review, the Missouri Review, Pleiades, and elsewhere. She has received a Pushcart Prize, the Iowa Review Award in Poetry, the Cincinnati Review’s Schiff Award, and a PEN America Emerging Voices Fellowship. She lives in Los Angeles.
Photographer Lola Flash’s work challenges gender, sexual, and racial preconceptions and other stereotypes. An active member of ACT UP during the time of the AIDS epidemic in New York City, Flash was notably featured in the 1989 “Kissing Doesn’t Kill” poster. Flash has work in the collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, MoMA, the Whitney, the National Museum of African American History and Culture, and the Brooklyn Museum. They are a member of the Kamoinge Collective and the president of the board at Queer Art.
Nathalie Handal is described by Claire Messud as a “contemporary Orpheus.” She has lived on four continents and is the author of more than ten books, translated into over fifteen languages, including Roma Roam and Life in a Country Album, winner of the Palestine Book Award. She is a professor at New York University Abu Dhabi and writes the column “The City and the Writer” for Words Without Borders.
About the portfolio’s editors:
Shuchi Saraswat is senior editor of AGNI and has been part of the editorial team since 2019. Her essays have appeared in Ploughshares, Orion, Michigan Quarterly Review, and elsewhere, and have received special mentions in The Best American Essays and The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses. Founder and former director of the Transnational Literature Series at Brookline Booksmith, she’s served as a judge for several prizes and awards, including the 2019 National Book Award in Translated Literature. She lives in Boston.
Ru Freeman is a Sri Lankan and American writer, poet, and activist. She is the author of Open Carry: Poems (forthcoming Trio House Press, 2027), an essay collection, a short story collection, and two novels. She is the editor of the anthology, Extraordinary Rendition: (American) Writers on Palestine (O/R Books, 2015; Interlink, 2016) and coeditor of Indivisible: Global Leaders on Shared Security (Interlink, 2018). A recipient of the Mariella Gable Award for Fiction, and the JH Kafka Prize for Fiction by an American Woman, she teaches creative writing in the U.S. and abroad.
Preti Taneja is the author of the novel We That Are Young and the nonfiction book Aftermath. Her work has received the Desmond Elliott Prize, a Philip Leverhulme Prize in Languages and Literatures, and the Gordon Burn Prize. A MacDowell Fellow in fiction, she serves on the board of trustees of English PEN. She lives and works in Newcastle Upon Tyne, in the United Kingdom.
Saturday, November 7th, 2026, at 12:00 p.m. ET
To register: https://tls-proximity.eventbrite.com
Contact us for accessibility or other questions.
agnimag
By the AGNI staff.