EVENT
San Francisco Launch for Lavil: Life, Love, and Death in Port-Au-Prince
Friday, July 21, 2017 | 7:30pm – 9:00pm
The Booksmith (View map)
1644 Haight St
San Francisco, CA 94117
Free
Join us as we celebrate the launch of Lavil: Life, Love, and Death in Port-au-Prince from Verso Press / Voice of Witness at The Booksmith in San Francisco.
Editors Peter Orner, Dr. Evan Lyon, and Laura Lampton Scott will discuss this immersive and engrossing oral history collection that shares stories from locals in Lavil (as Port-Au-Prince is known to Haitians). As the cultural, political, and economic capital of Haiti and home to over 2.5 million resilient souls, Lavil is the center of an island nation rocked by crises and still recovering from the deadliest earthquake in the history of the Western Hemisphere.
About the Participants
Peter Orner is the author of two novels, The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo and Love and Shame and Love, as well as two collections of stories, Esther Stories and Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge. For the Voice of Witness series, Orner also co-edited Hope Deferred: Narratives of Zimbabwean Lives with Annie Holmes. Orner has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and holds a law degree from Northeastern University. He is currently a Professor of Creative Writing at San Francisco State University.
Dr. Evan Lyon has worked in Haiti since 1996 and is currently the Chief Integrated Health Officer at Heartland Health Outreach in Chicago. Through his work with Partners in Health, Lyon has helped community-based responses to address HIV, tuberculosis and broader public health concerns throughout Haiti. He has also frequently collaborated with Paul Farmer on articles related to community health and human rights.
Laura Lampton Scott‘s fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, Tin House online, the Guardian, Okey-Panky, and other publications. Scott has taught fiction at the University of Montana and currently teaches at Literary Arts in Portland, Oregon. She is a MacDowell Colony fellow.
RSVP on Facebook. More info on the The Booksmith website.
