Join us and Queens-based author Abeer Hoque for her new memoir, Olive Witch. Hoque will be joined in conversation by Queens writer, Nadia Ahmad.
In the 1970s, Nigeria is flush with oil money, building new universities, and hanging on to old colonial habits.
Abeer Hoque is a Bangladeshi girl growing up in a small sunlit university town where the red clay earth, corporal punishment and running games are facts of life. At thirteen she moves with her family to suburban Pittsburgh and finds herself surrounded by clouded skies and high schoolers who speak in movie quotes and pop culture slang. Finding her place as a young woman in America proves more difficult than she can imagine. Disassociated from her parents and laid low by academic pressure and a spiraling depression, she is committed to a psychiatric ward in Philadelphia. When she moves to Bangladesh on her own, it proves yet another beginning for someone who is only just getting used to being an outsider – wherever she is.