IMAGINE! Sonali Samarasinghe & Heather E. Murray in Conversation

Twenty-five years ago, a group of local writers declared Ithaca a place where persecuted writers and artists could safely speak their minds and exercise their imaginations. Since then, Ithaca City of Asylum has welcomed creative and courageous individuals from China, Iran, Swaziland, Georgia, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Nicaragua, and Russia for two-year residencies. 

Celebrate this 25th anniversary year with IMAGINE!, a series of dialogues on the power of imagination as a public good. Each pairs a former program participant with a local resident working creatively in another field to share their perspectives on making art, exercising rights, and imagining a better world for all.

On Halloween, the featured guests are Sri Lankan human rights activist, poet, fiction writer, memoirist, and journalist Sonali Samarasinghe (writer-in-residence from 2012 to 2014) and First Amendment specialist and civil rights attorney Heather E. Murray. The moderator will be Jason Freitag, professor of South Asian History at Ithaca College and chair of the Advisory Board of Ithaca City of Asylum.

Admission is free and open to the public but donations will be gladly accepted.

Story House Ithaca is proud to co-host the IMAGINE! series. Both Ithaca City of Asylum and Story House Ithaca are projects of the Center for Transformative Action.