Memoir: Home and Away, A panel discussion with fellow author Michael Lowenthal, moderated by Tina Cassidy.

Two award-winning fiction writers trace displacement and connection, identity and legacy in their evocative new essay collections. In Our Arab: On Longing, Belonging, and Hope, Lambda Literary Award–winning novelist Zaina Arafat considers the emotional landscape of living in the diaspora as a Palestinian. With essays that move from Nablus to the Appalachian Mountains, Amman to Manhattan, Arafat offers a “beautiful and thoroughly honest meditation on home as both journey and destination” (Omar El Akkad). In Place Envy: Essays in Search of Orientation, Michael Lowenthal chronicles his travels as a queer, agnostic Jewish man—including visiting his grandmother’s German hometown, a love affair in Brazil, living with Amish family in Pennsylvania, playing jazz with Afrofuturist Sun Ra—“all the while asking what world, what place, can hold us all and all that we contain” (Lyz Lenz). Tina Cassidy, Chief Marketing Officer of GBH, will guide this meaningful conversation.