Deborah Jackson Taffa in conversation with Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi

This event will be held in-person and livestreamed on Zoom. Register to attend in person / Register to attend via Zoom

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Literatures of Annihilation, Exile, and Resistance, launched by Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi, is a research collective and lecture series co-sponsored by the College of Arts & Letters and the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies and housed at the Institute for Social Concerns at the University of Notre Dame.

Deborah Jackson Taffa is the director of the MFA CW Program at the Institute of American Indian Arts. Her memoir Whiskey Tender was a finalist for the 2024 National Book Award, as well as a longlisted title for a 2025 Carnegie Medal of Excellence in Nonfiction. It was named a Top Ten Book of 2024 by The Atlantic, Time Magazine, and Audible, as well as a top book on longer lists at NPR, Elle, Esquire, The NY Times, The New Yorker and Publisher’s Weekly. Taffa is a 2024 NEA Fellow, a 2022 winner of the PEN/Jean Stein Grant for Literary Oral History, and has received fellowships from Tin House, the University of Iowa, MacDowell, the Rona Jaffe Foundation, the Ellen Meloy Fund, and the New York State Summer Writers Institute. She is a citizen of the Kwatsaan (Yuma) Nation and Laguna Pueblo and earned her nonfiction MFA in Iowa City. Her writing can be found at The Boston Review, Poets and Writers, The Huff Post, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and many other outlets. 

Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi is an American novelist and non-fiction writer. She is the author of Call Me Zebra, named a Best Book of the Year by over twenty publications and the winner of the 2019 PEN/Faulkner Award, the John Gardner Award, and long listed for the PEN/Open Book Award. Her other novels include Savage Tongues and Fra Keeler, for which she received a Whiting Writers’ Award and a National Book Foundation “5 Under 35” award. She was the 2023-2024 Carl and Lily Pforzheimer Foundation Fiction Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies at Harvard University. A recipient of fellowships from Fulbright, the Aspen Institute, MacDowell, and Art Omi, her work has appeared twice in The Best American Short Stories (Ed. by Min Jin Lee in 2023 and by Lauren Groff in 2024), The Sewanee Review, The Yale Review, The New York Times, and The Paris Review among other places. In 2020, she founded Literatures of Annihilation, Exile & Resistance, a conversation series focused on the intersection of the arts and transformational migrations. Born in Los Angeles to an Iranian mother and a British father, she spent her childhood in Iran, the United Arab Emirates, and Spain, and speaks Farsi, Italian, and Spanish. She is the Dorothy G. Griffin College Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame.

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Literatures of Annihilation, Exile, and Resistance focuses on contemporary literature, film, and visual art that has been shaped by revolutionary movements, migration, and human rights violations. We aim to theorize new modes of contemporary literary and artistic resistance across national borders and to amplify the voices of scholars, artists, and writers whose lived experience is instrumental in forging new alliances across formal, linguistic and national boundaries.

This event is sponsored by Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, Creative Writing Program, Department of English, Liu Institute for Asia and Asian Studies, The Graduate School, Department of American Studies, Gender Studies Program, Institute for Social Concerns, Teaching Beyond the Classroom Grants, The Brookline Booksmith Transnational Literature Series and the Franco Family Institute for Liberal Arts and the Public Good/Henkels Grant.