The Wrong End of The Telescope: a conversation with Rabih Alameddine and Susan Stryker

Thursday March 31, 2022 | 5:00 PM PDT
Presented by We Are The Voices and the Mills College Trans Studies Speakers Series

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Color photographs of the event speakers: Susan Stryker on teh left dressed in black pants, shirt and jacket is seated looking of of frame; Rabih Alameddine stands in a library looking at teh camera through hornrimmed glasses dressed in a blue and collared shirt. Photos courtesty of the authors. Design by Joshua Zuniga.

Susan Stryker, Barbara Lee Distinguished Chair in Women's Leadership, joins with queer, Bay Area-based author, Rabih Alameddine, to discuss his latest novel, The Wrong End of The Telescope (2021). The novel centers around trans protagonist, Mina Simpson, a Lebanese doctor, who arrives at the infamous Moria refugee camp on Lesbos, Greece, after being urgently summoned for help. The wide ranging discussion of Rabih’s work and career will include a reading from the new book and an open-ended Q&A. Read more about Rabih Alameddine's work at rabihalameddine.com

Rabih Alameddine is the author of the novels The Wrong End of the Telescope; The Angel of History; An Unnecessary Woman; The Hakawati; I, the Divine; and Koolaids; as well as the story collection The Perv. His books have been translated into more than 20 languages, and his writing has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Guardian, and other publications. His honors include a Lannan Fiction Award, a John Dos Passos Prize for Literature, a Harold Washington Literary Award, a Lambda Literary Award, two Arab American Book Awards, both a California and a Northern California Book Award, a Prix Femina, a Rome Prize, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He divides his time between his bedroom and his living room.

We Are The Voices is a Mellon Foundation Higher Learning funded project linking Mills College students and faculty with poets and scholars working in Oakland and beyond.

The Mills College Trans Studies Speakers Series, hosted by Emmy-Award winner Susan Stryker, Barbara Lee Distinguished Visiting Professor in Women's Leadership, offers a regular public forum for exploring transgender issues with some of today's leading thinkers, artists, and activists. 

Mills College Trans Studies Speaker Series logo featuring an abstract graphic with bright red lips outlining an eye with a hazel iris and inside that a blue and pink eye and center a revolutionary fist raisedWe Are The Voices logo with the initials in blue and name spelled out in smaller gold type to the right.