LITERATURE · 🇵🇸
Elena Dudum & Kiese Laymon
Friday, November 6 · 7:00pm - 8:00pm · Tribeca
Elena Dudum reads from her debut memoir They Told Me Back Home Would Be Beautiful, a deeply felt exploration of Palestinian American identity, family inheritance, and the reckoning that comes when abstraction becomes lived reality. Dudum traces her journey from a childhood shaped by her father's archival obsession and lectures on Palestine, through years of resistance and escape into elite institutions and tech, to a deliberate return to the lessons she tried to outrun.
Dudum is a Palestinian American writer whose work has appeared in The Atlantic, Time, Cosmopolitan, and Bon Appétit; she received the 2025 Whiting Nonfiction Grant for early chapters of this book. She'll be joined by Kiese Laymon, a Black southern writer from Jackson, Mississippi, author of Heavy: An American Memoir and the forthcoming Good, God: A Creation Story.
The reading happens in the bookstore's Seaport location. RSVP through the link provided.
