Events
PWA Presents: �Building Inclusive Communities" with Author and Activist Deepa Iyer
Date and Time
Monday, June 13, 2016 5:30 PM
Description
Join the Progressive Women’s Alliance for a book talk and conversation with author, lawyer and racial justice activist, Deepa Iyer, on June 13, 2016 at 5:30 pm at GVSU’s Loosemore Auditorium.
Deepa Iyer is a South Asian American activist, writer, and lawyer.
She is currently the Senior Fellow at the Center for Social Inclusion
where she provides analysis, commentary and scholarship on equity and
solidarity in America’s changing racial landscape. In November 2015,
The New Press published Deepa’s first book, We Too Sing America: South
Asian, Arab, Muslim and Sikh Immigrants Shape Our Multiracial Future.
Scholar Vijay Prashad has written that Deepa “brings the head of a
lawyer and the heart of a community activist to bear on her
remarkable book…It is a window into the struggles of the margins that
allow the mainstream to remain humane.” Deepa’s book was selected by
the American Librarians Association’s Booklist magazine to be one of
the top 10 multicultural non-fiction books of the year.
Most recently, Deepa served as the Executive Director of South
Asian Americans Leading Together (SAALT) for ten years. She has also
served as Trial Attorney at the Civil Rights Division of the U.S.
Department of Justice, where with two other attorneys, she shaped an
initiative to address post 9/11 backlash, and as Legal Director of the
Asian Pacific American Legal Resource Center (APALRC), where she
worked on a multiracial, community-led campaign to pass the DC
Language Access Act.
Deepa has taught classes on Asian American movements and South
Asian American communities at Columbia University, Hunter College, and
the University of Maryland where she served as Activist-in-Residence
in the Asian American Studies Program in 2014. Deepa’s opinion
editorials on issues ranging from the post 9/11 backlash to
immigration reform to anti-Black racism have appeared in The New York
Times, The Guardian, Al-Jazeera America, and The Nation.
An immigrant who moved to Kentucky when she was twelve, Deepa
graduated from the University of Notre Dame Law School and Vanderbilt
University. Deepa is the Chair of the Board of Directors of Race Forward.
Information
For more information, please visit: http://act.myngp.com/Forms/Preview/-7036744075012864000