On October 10, the Campus Reading Program will host “Walking to A Good Country, Literature in the Age of Displacement” from 12:00-1:15 p.m. in Student Union 1B. 

SJSU English Professor Dr. Keenan Norris will interview author Laleh Khadivi, followed by a Q & A session. Khadivi is an award winning author of three novels, a filmmaker, and an Associate Professor of English at the University of San Francisco.

This discussion is meant to start conversations about themes in the SJSU Campus Reading Program’s selected book for the 2024-25 year: The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives, an anthology of essays edited by Viet Thanh Nguyen. During their discussion, Dr. Norris and Laleh Khadivi will explore topics in The Displaced, as well as those in Khadivi’s two most recent novels, The Walking and A Good Country. 

Laleh Khadivi was born in Esfahan, Iran. Her debut novel, The Age of Orphans, received the Whiting Award for Fiction, the Barnes and Nobles Discover New Writers Award and an Emory Fiction Fellowship.

Her debut documentary film 900 WOMEN aired on A&E and premiered at the Human Rights Watch Film Festival. She has worked as director, producer and cinematographer of documentary films since 1999. Her fiction and non-fiction can be found in The Los Angeles Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, VQR, The Sun and other publications. She is the recipient of a 2016 National Endowment for the Arts Grant and a 2016 Pushcart Prize for her story, “Wanderlust.” She lives in Northern California.

Keenan Norris’s latest book is Chi Boy: Native Sons and Chicago Reckonings. His novel The Confession of Copeland Cane won the 2022 Northern California Book Award and his essays have received the National Arts & Entertainment Journalism Award and Folio: Eddie Award. He teaches at San Jose State University.