Talk by Anissa Bouziane “Dune Song: Literature as a Map between East and West”

Talk by Anissa Bouziane “Dune Song: Literature as a Map between East and West” | 04/10/2019 | 10:00 am-11:00 am

Talk by Anissa Bouziane "Dune Song: Literature as a Map between East and West”

Anissa Bouziane was born in the United States to a Moroccan father and French mother. She is a writer, filmmaker, and teacher who has been working on issues of the divide between the East and West for more than twenty years. She will be talking about her first novel, Dune Song / Sables, which is coming out in France and the U.S. this fall and is in competition for the Edinburgh International Book Festival’s First Book Award. The book, rooted in the personal experience of witnessing the collapse of the Twin Towers, centers around the events of 9/11 as seen from the perspective of an Arab-American woman. Click here to read a book review.

“Constructed like a puzzle which assembles itself before our eyes, Anissa Bouziane’s book is lifted, feather-like, by a prose both precise and delicate. An epic tale made of strong images where style breathes with force into the immensity of the story’s spaces.”  E. Thiboud — Le Monde

Bouziane has a Master of Fine Arts from Columbia University, a bachelor’s degree in political sciences from Wellesley College, a certificate in film from New York University, and she is completing a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Warwick. Her award-winning experimental films and installation art, produced in collaboration with photographer Yasmina Bouziane, was at the forefront of discussion about Arab identity in the West in the decade before September 11th. She lived and worked in New York City for more than ten years, until 2002 when she moved back to Morocco and then France.

Today, Bouziane lives and writes in Paris. She is an educational consultant and teaches English and American literature. She specializes in using creative writing to teach English to non-native speakers. Her essays and short stories have been published in The International Herald Tribune, The San Francisco Chronicle, the magazine Tolerance, and the RAWI Anthology of Arab-American Writing. Her short and experimental films have been shown worldwide, at the Festival National du Cinema Marocain, the Rawafid film festival in Casablanca, the Pasadena Film Festival, and the Berkley Film and Video Festival, where the Bouziane Sisters’ first film, Yellow Nylon Rope, won first prize. Their installation work has been on display in galleries including New Langton Arts Gallery in San Francisco and Columbia University’s French House. Always busy, Bouziane is hard at work on her next novel.

This talk is free and open to the public. No reservations necessary, but seating is limited. The Speaker Series has been made possible with the support of the Embassy of the United States of America, France. / Avec le soutien de l’Ambassade des États-Unis d’Amérique.


Location: English-language Library in Angers