Voices of Freedom: Two internationally known authors whose writings have been suppressed will read selections from their work at Ithaca City of Asylum's commemoration of Banned Books Week, the nationwide initiative celebrating the fundamental right to read.

Featured Authors: Novelist Horacio Castellanos Moya, in exile from El Salvador after receiving death threats for writing about the dangers of unchecked nationalism; and fiction writer and poet Sarah Mkhonza, a powerful voice for the disenfranchised in southern Africa, who was forced to flee her native Swaziland after writing about injustices under the monarchy.

Featured Performers: Between readings, Los Soneros will play music from the Caribbean and Latin America. Los Soneros are Carlos H. Gutierez (Chile), Andre LeClair (Canada), Victor Rosa (Puerto Rico), and Victor Torres (Puerto Rico).

The event’s special guest, Horacio Castellanos Moya, is the Pittsburgh City of Asylum writer-in-residence. He is considered one of the most important Central American writers alive today. A biting satirist critical of both ends of the political spectrum, “he writes from the bowels of one of the many volcanoes that pepper his country,” wrote Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño. Castellanos Moya has published five short story collections and eight novels, among them Revulsion: Thomas Bernhard in San Salvador, which earned him death threats for exposing links between right-wing leaders and organized crime in El Salvador and forced him into exile. His novel Senselessness will be published in English in spring 2008 by New Directions.

Ithaca City of Asylum (ICOA) writer-in-residence Sarah Mkhonza was threatened for publishing stories criticizing her country’s ruling regime and condemning societal acceptance of violence against women. She fled Swaziland after her university office was broken into and her computer and diskettes destroyed. “Sarah Mkhonza's courage is a rare and marvelous expression of resistance and outrage against a regime that has managed to silence and intimidate the majority of its people,” wrote her colleague Dr. Patricia McFadden.

Mkhonza received a Hammett-Hellman Award from Human Rights Watch in 2002 and was granted political asylum by the United States in 2005. Named ICOA’s writer-in-residence for 2006-08, she is a visiting scholar in Cornell University’s Department of English and Africana Studies and Research Center and a frequent speaker at area schools and colleges. Voices of Freedom marks the publication by Vista Periodista of Two Stories, a chapbook of two of Mkhonza’s best short stories, which will be for sale at the event and at the Bookery for $12.95.

Castellanos Moya also will read from his writing Monday, Oct. 1, at 4 p.m. at Ithaca College’s Handwerker Gallery in the Gannett Center, and Monday, Oct. 1, at 8 p.m. at Cornell University’s Hollis E. Cornell Auditorium in Goldwin Smith Hall.

All readings are free and open to the public.

ICOA is part of a global network of cities of refuge for writers whose lives have been threatened and whose works have been suppressed. ICOA is affiliated with the CRESP Center for Transformative Action. Supported entirely by private and community donations and grants, ICOA works in partnership with Cornell, Ithaca College, and Hobart and William Smith Colleges. In the past, ICOA has provided refuge for poet and essayist Yi Ping, a major figure in China's underground literature movement, and Reza Daneshvar, an exiled Iranian novelist, playwright and theater director.

“Voices of Freedom” is made possible in part with funds from the Community Arts Partnership of Tompkins County/NYS Council on the Arts Decentralization Program. For more information see: http://cresp.cornell.edu/projects/ithaca_city_asylum.php