An Evening with Fatimah Asghar and Maurice Carlos Ruffin

Pioneer Works and One World present an evening featuring Fatimah Asghar and Maurice Carlos Ruffin in conversation, as part of the Pioneer Works Press series Groundworks. Asghar will read from her recent poetry collection If They Come For Us, which captures her experience as a Pakistani Muslim woman in contemporary America, while exploring identity, violence, and healing. Ruffin will read from his novel We Cast A Shadow—a bold, provocative debut about a father’s obsessive quest to protect his son, even if it means turning him white. Following the readings and conversation with the authors, join us for a signing and reception.

Fatimah Asghar is a nationally touring poet, performer, educator, and writer. She is the writer of Brown Girls, an Emmy-nominated web series that highlights friendships between women of color. She is a member of the Dark Noise Collective and a 2017 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellow.

Maurice Carlos Ruffin has been a recipient of an Iowa Review Award in fiction and a winner of the William Faulkner–William Wisdom Creative Writing Competition for Novel-in-Progress. His work has appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review, AGNI, The Kenyon Review, The Massachusetts Review, and Unfathomable City: A New Orleans Atlas. A native of New Orleans, Ruffin is a graduate of the University of New Orleans Creative Writing Workshop and a member of the Peauxdunque Writers Alliance.

One World is the home of groundbreaking writers, thinkers, activists, and artists. They aim to publish the boldest, most original works of fact and imagination from a diverse group of excellent writers—riveting narratives that give us a new language to understand our past, imagine our future, and see our present in all its complexity.

Groundworks is a series of readings and conversations devoted to literature that eludes categorization and broadens the parameters of the written word. Inspired by the earliest book series from Pioneer Works Press, and organized with the belief that publishing is essential to accessing the arts, each program focuses on narrative works vital to the evolution of cultural discourse.