Strengthening Community by Building a City of Asylum in Rochester
In 2004, City of Asylum/Pittsburgh opened with a mission: to provide sanctuary to literary writers who were exiled and under threat of persecution. Since then, this fertile organization has grown and enriched the entire Pittsburgh community. Through its public arts programming, bookstore featuring works in translation, neighborhood restaurant, and houses for use by writers and artists-in-exile—each with a text-based artwork on the façade—City of Asylum/Pittsburgh has become a hub for artistic and community partnerships that express humanity’s best creative impulses. It’s “a place where Pittsburgh meets the world and the world meets Pittsburgh.”
Our own upcoming Arts of Asylum series, a virtual, interactive forum, features distinguished writers, musicians, and artists along with community partners serving refugee and asylum-seeking populations to:
- Raise awareness about the City of Asylum network,
- Help create a new City of Asylum/Rochester as the fifth U.S. City of Asylum location, and
- Explore how the City of Asylum/Rochester will engage in creative placemaking to support local communities.
Writing in the Cities of Asylum
Date: September 16, 2021, 5:00 – 6:15 pm EDT
For this first installment, Alison Meyers, Executive Director of Rochester’s Writers and Books, will sit down with exiled Bengali poet, activist, and political columnist Tuhin Das to discuss his journey from being the target of fundamentalist groups in his native Bangladesh to a writer in residence at City of Asylum Pittsburgh.
Visit the Arts of Asylum webpage for more information on this and future events.