nika & tony’s book

on nika dubrovsky and Tony Mochama’s why the world fell out of love w america

via tweet [https://x.com/nikadubrovsky/status/2039286973244879029?s=20]:

Dear all,
My new friend, Tony Mochama, (an amazing Kenyan writer) and I are writing a book called Why the World Fell Out of Love with America.

from tony’s wikipedia page [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Mochama]: Tony Adam Mochama (born 9 May 1975), also known as Smitta Smitten is a Kenyan poet, writer, author and a senior journalist at The Nation Media Group. Mochama is a three-time winner of the Burt Awards for African Young Adult Literature and he is also a recipient of the Miles Morland Writing Scholarship..Mochama was a 2013 resident poet at the Ca’Foscari University, Venezia, Italy and a 2019 Emily Harvey Foundation resident writer in Venice, Italy. He has also visited Canada, London, Portugal and (Germany) under different literary activities as a speaker, reader and facilitator.

Tony grew up in Kenya, and I grew up in the Soviet Union, but we were both completely under the spell of the USA for the longest time ever.

Probably you know what I mean.

The book is a story of love and divorce (from a nation we once adored).

It will try to document the pulse of how these feelings changed, but not only for us, but for the rest of the world.

The book is woven from private experiences, recollections, diary entries written across the span of our lives, and bridged by larger concept essays.

What we are looking for is to include short fragments from people we know — people from different parts of the world, different generations, different relationships to America – and its seductive mythology. Not an interview in the formal sense. Just a small piece of memory or feeling: how America shaped your inner world, and what happened to those feelings over time.
It’s a bitter story, in some ways. But it’s also a beautiful one, and an important one.

It can be a single scene. It can be a few pages, capturing the personal arc of your ‘feelings’ journey with America ( from illusion to disillusionment).

It can be something you’ve already written somewhere — a note, an old email, a line from something. Or something entirely new, as you read this!

Thank you all in advance. Hopefully it would be a fun project.
Please, write to contact@davidgraber.org

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