A COUNTRY YOU CAN LEAVE

OCTOBER THIRD THURSDAY

Register here

1 PM OCTOBER 19th

VIRTUAL CONVERSATION

​Join CEE for a conversation with author Asale Angel-Ajani on her book "A Country You Can Leave". We have 4 books available for in-person pickup for the first interested readers that get in touch with us ([email protected]).

When sixteen-year-old Lara and her fiery mother, Yevgenia, find themselves homeless again, the misnamed Oasis Mobile Estates is all they can afford. In this new community, where residents are down on their luck but rich in humor and escape plans, Lara navigates what it means to be the Black, biracial daughter of a Russian mother and begins to wonder what a life beyond Yevgenia's orbit—insistence on reading only the right kind of books (Russian), having the right kind of relationships (casual, with lots of sex)—might look like.

Lara knows that something else lies beneath her mother's fierce, independent spirit, but Yevgenia doesn't believe in sharing, least of all with her daughter. When a brutal attack exposes the cracks in their relationship, Lara and Yevgenia are forced to confront the family legacy of violence and the strain of inherited trauma on the bonds of their love.

A Country You Can Leave is a dazzling, sharp-witted story, suffused with yearning, as Lara and Yevgenia attempt to forge their own identities and thrive in a hostile land. Compelling and empathetic, wry and intimate, Asale Angel-Ajani's unforgettable debut novel examines the beauty and dangers of womanhood in multiracial America.

ASALE ANGEL-AJANI

Asale Angel-Ajani is a writer, scholar and activist with expertise on Global Mass Incarceration, the African Diaspora, and the rights of women. She is the author of two books, Strange Trade: The Story of Two Women Who Risked Everything in the International Drug Trade and the forthcoming, Parasitic States and Penal Colonies: Gender, Migration and the Carceral World Order and co-editor, with Victoria Sanford, of Engaged Observer: Activism, Advocacy and Anthropology. Over the last two decades, Angel-Ajani has worked with incarcerated women and men all over the world and has worked with refugees and displaced people in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Colombia, Ecuador, Hong Kong, Italy, Spain, and Greece. She has been a research fellow at the United Nations Interregional Crime and Justice Institute and was the first American researcher to gain entry into Italy's Rebibbia Prison, where she wrote about African immigrants detained there. A graduate of Stanford University, Angel-Ajani has her doctorate in Anthropology. She also holds an MFA in Creative Writing. She teaches a variety of courses but her favorite offerings explore the rise of the carceral state in a global context, creative writing, and Women of Color Feminist Theory.

KEISHA-KHAN PERRY

Keisha-Khan Y. Perry is the Presidential Penn Compact Associate Professor of Africana Studies. Perry comes to Penn from Brown University, where she was Associate Professor of Africana Studies. Her research is focused on race, gender and politics in the Americas, urban geography and questions of citizenship, intellectual history and disciplinary formation, and the interrelationship between scholarship, pedagogy and political engagement. Her first book, Black Women against the Land Grab: The Fight for Racial Justice in Brazil, won the 2014 National Women’s Studies Association Gloria Anzaldúa Book Prize. She is currently at work on her second book, which is focused on the ways in which state violence limits activist research and writing.