Objects tell tales and hide secrets. They hold memory and loss, joy and grief, anger and euphoria. They unlock histories. Using the photographs in Local Voices: Memories, Stories, and Portraits as a creative departure point, we will write about a meaningful object in your life. Maybe it’s an ordinary thing, like a well-worn coat, or maybe it is precious, like a ring from a woman you cannot forget. We will write from memory, and explore different ways to tell the story of our beloved object and what it means in our life.
Instructor: Meera Nair is an author, teacher, and immigrant rights activist. She is the author of Video: Stories (Random House) and the children’s books Maya Saves the Day and Maya in a Mess (Penguin: India); Video won the 7th Annual Asian-American Literary Award and was a Washington Post Best Book of the Year. Nair’s work has been featured on NPR’s Selected Shorts, in the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Guardian, the Common, and Guernica, among other places and in several anthologies in the US and abroad. Nair won the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship twice, as well as fellowships from the New York Times, the MacDowell Artists’ Colony, and Queens Council for the Arts. She was the Writer-in-Residence at Fordham University from 2011-2014, and teaches writing at New York University and Brooklyn College. She lives in Queens, NY. To learn more about Meera, visit here.
This program is in tandem with the exhibition Local Voices: Memories, Stories and Portraits.
Local Voices: Memories, Stories and Portraits is supported by the New Jersey Council for the Humanities, a state partner of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
