Join the CMES for its MENA Lit Chat with author Laleh Khadivi on her novel A Good Country. A timely novel about the radicalization of a Muslim teen in California--about where identity truly lies, and how we find it. Khadivi is the author of The Kurdish Trilogy which includes The Age of Orphans (2009), The Walking (2013) and A Good Country (forthcoming, 2017). Her fiction and non-fiction have appeared in the LA Times, San Francisco Chronicle, VQR, and The Sun. She has worked as a documentary filmmaker since 2000 and her films have been screened in festivals and on various cable networks. She is the recipient of a 2016 National Endowment for the Arts Grant and a 2016 Pushcart Prize for her story Wanderlust. She holds an MFA from Mills College and lives in Northern California. Khadivi will be in conversation with CMES Program Coordinator Michael David Lukas, author of the international bestselling novel The Oracle of Stamboul, which was a finalist for the California Book Award, the NCIBA Book of the Year Award, and the Harold U. Ribalow Prize, and has been published in fifteen languages. His second novel, The Last Watchman of Old Cairo, is forthcoming from Spiegel & Grau in Spring 2018. He has been a Fulbright Scholar in Turkey, a student at the American University of Cairo, and a night-shift proofreader in Tel Aviv. A graduate of Brown University, he has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Santa Maddalena Foundation, and his writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Slate, and VQR. He lives in Oakland, California.