The second Annual IAAC Literary Festival is scheduled at Hunter College, NYCand kicks off on October 22nd with veteran cook-book maven, actor, director Madhur Jaffrey whose latest book Vegetarian India is a kitchen essential for vegetable enthusiasts and home cooks everywhere. Award winning food writer and actress Madhur Jaffrey has won numerous accolades in theatre, film and food! Six of her cookbooks have won the James Beard Award for food and beverage in America. With more than two hundred recipes, beautifully illustrated throughout, and including personal photographs from Jaffrey’s own travels.
The festival commences with an Opening Night celebration on October 23rd of the twin cities of Bombay and New York!! Sir Salman Rushdie & Suketu Mehta engage in conversation as Bombay Boys in New York. Both authors have written extensively about both cities – the fecund and the dazzle, cities which aren’t typical of either of the two countries they inhabit. Suketu wrote Maximum City Bombay Lost & Found and is currently writing a book on New York in the same vein. Salman has referenced and set several of his novels in Bombay and his current book Two Years, Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nightsopens in New York with a trip to Bombay.
October 24th and 25th from 10:30 am – 5:30 pm we present the most amazing breakout sessions on myriad literary genres with special focus on a few highlights: two foodie panels with Padma Lakshmi and a host of NY chefs whose books are flying off the shelves; two panels on Islamophobia – one discussing books on the subject and the other with Mahmood Mamdani & Akeel Bilgrami on the hot topic of refugees, migrants and terrorists; a panel zeroing in on Quantico by two writers from that show; a sesion with Ram Jethmalani who is most certainly going to give us his opinion on the current state of India under Modi; panels on historical fiction, women’s stories, LGBT, poetry, and most important for emerging and self-published writers – a panel with publishers and literary agents who will share their secrets of how and why they choose what they do and another with Social Media Guru Sree Sreenivasan who will advise them how to publicize their books!! Details: http://www.iaac.us/Literary-
Saturday October 24th at 9 pm relax at our Literary Pub Crawl…..local actors take visitors on a Literary tour of Greenwich Village, visiting bars frequented by literati…..listen to passionate recitations and fantastic tales…..imbibe…gawk … grin….participate!
Closing Night at this fabulous little gem of a festival on Sunday night October 25th at 7 pm focuses on our Page to Stage session featuring Director Mira Nair and Writer Sabrina Dhawan in conversation about taking Monsoon Wedding to Broadway!!! Mira and Sabrina will discuss the process of page to stage(and screen to stage) as well as their amazing collaboration on both the film and the play. Filmmaker, screenwriter, producer Sabrina Dhawan made her screenwriting debut with Director Mira Nair’s Monsoon Wedding which won the Leon D’Oro at the Venice Film Festival and received a Golden Globe nomination. Sabrina is now writing a script for the upcoming Stage Production of Mira’s Monsoon Wedding.
Every session is followed by Q&A, books are available for sale at the Festival Bookstore and all the authors are around to talk, to sign books and to be interviewed.
