Joel Whitney presents Flights: Radicals on the Run, with Amitav Ghosh

Joel Whitney's genre-defying nonfiction work Flights creates an archetypal hero’s journey from the stories of progressive creators whose struggle for truth, and for freedom from persecution, sent them into literal and metaphorical exile. Whitney portrays a rich array of refugees all forced to flee homes and/or friends because of their progressive stance, including Angela Davis, Lorraine Hansberry, Graham Greene, Gabriel García Márquez, and many more. At once a group portrait of these geniuses of creative escape, Flights is also a prehistory (and indictment) of American mass surveillance, torture, censorship, fascism and political murders. Junot Diaz calls it "an absolutely overwhelming, magisterial tour-de-force." Whitney discusses his work, along with a reading and book signing.

Books will be available for purchase from Greenlight Bookstore.

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Participants

Joel Whitney curates the Brooklyn Public Library’s literary programs and is the author of Finks: How the CIA Tricked the World's Best Writers, which The New Republic called a “powerful warning.” His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Daily Beast, The Baffler, The Wall Street Journal, Boston Review, New York Magazine, and elsewhere. He is a former features editor at Al Jazeera America and a founder and former editor-in-chief of Guernica, for which he was awarded the 2017 PEN/Nora Magid Award for Excellence in Editing. His essays in The Baffler, Dissent and Salon were Notables in Best American Essays 2017, 2015 and 2013. He is a special advisor to the Lenape Center and helped spearhead the 2022 Lenapehoking exhibit and co-edited the accompanying anthology of Lenape history and culture. Photo credit Sean Jerd

Amitav Ghosh is the author of The Circle of Reason, The Shadow Lines, In An Antique Land, Dancing in Cambodia, The Calcutta Chromosome, The Glass Palace, The Hungry Tide, and The Ibis Trilogy. The Great Derangement; Climate Change and the Unthinkable, a work of non-fiction, appeared in 2016 and won the inaugural Utah Award for the Environmental Humanities in 2018. The Circle of Reason was awarded France’s Prix Médicis in 1990, and The Shadow Lines won two prestigious Indian prizes the same year, the Sahitya Akademi Award and the Ananda Puraskar. The Calcutta Chromosome won the Arthur C. Clarke award for 1997 and The Glass Palace won the International e-Book Award at the Frankfurt book fair in 2001. Ghosh’s work has been translated into more than thirty languages and he has served on the juries of the Locarno and Venice film festivals. His essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The New Republic and The New York Times. They have been anthologized under the titles The Imam and the Indian and Incendiary Circumstances.