This event was recorded July 25, 2023 at Pitkin County Library, in partnership with Aspen Public Radio.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jamil Jan Kochai is the author of “99 Nights in Logar” a finalist for the Pen/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel and the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature. His short story collection, “The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories”was published in July 2022. He was born in an Afghan refugee camp in Peshawar, Pakistan, but he originally hails from Logar, Afghanistan. His short stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Zoetrope, The O. Henry Prize Stories, and The Best American Short Stories. His essays have been published at The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. Kochai was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and a Truman Capote Fellow at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he was awarded the Henfield Prize for Fiction. Currently, he is a Hodder Fellow at Princeton University.
ABOUT THE STORY COLLECTION
“Jamil Jan Kochai has written a stylistically audacious collection about Afghans, Afghan Americans and the surreal, violent aftershocks of state violence. In 12 masterful stories, Kochai manages both an indictment and de-centering of the West’s decades-long campaign of violence through which countless Afghans have suffered. There is no clean-cut prescriptivism here: these stories of lives lost and regained in the shadow of the war on terror years are as impossible to categorize as they are wondrous to read.” – 2023 Literary Prize Jury
ABOUT THE MODERATOR
Breeze Richardson is the executive director of Aspen Public Radio. Richardson is highly-respected in public media for her strategic planning and communications background, as well as her passion for telling stories and producing community-focused programming. As director of strategic partnerships at WBEZ 91.5 FM in Chicago, Richardson fostered collaborative relationships with more than 70 cultural institutions and community organizations across the Chicagoland region. Richardson received a master’s degree in public policy from the University of Chicago, as well as bachelor’s degrees in economics and American Studies from The University of Kansas.
