City of Refuge: The Exiled Writer in Los Angeles

This program includes readings and discussion among writers in exile from their native countries. Majid Naficy, an Iranian poet who fled Khomeini’s regime at great risk, has lived in Los Angeles since 1985. He has published three collections of poems and holds a doctorate in Near Eastern Languages and Cultures from UCLA. Chinese novelist Anchee Min was born in Shanghai in 1957. At seventeen she was sent to a labor collective, where talent scouts discovered her and recruited her to work as a movie actress at the Shanghai Film Studio. Her memoir Red Azalea, about life during the Cultural Revolution, was an international bestseller. SAID, born in Tehran in 1947, was forced to leave Iran at age seventeen, and has lived in exile in Munich, Germany since 1964. His publications include Poems of Love, Then I Will Scream Until Silence, and his most recent work, The Long Arm of the Mullahs: Notes from My Exile.

This program was co-presented with Villa Aurora and produced in conjunction with the exhibition “Exiles and Emigres: The Flight of European Artists from Hitler” at LACMA.