Stories of Separation and Belonging: Exploring Migration, Partition and Displacement

Adrian Lysenko is the author of Five Stalks of Grain, a graphic novel illustrated by Ivanka Theodosia Galadza that tells a story of tragedy and survival during the Holodomor, the terror-famine that claimed millions of lives in Soviet Ukraine. He’s the editor-in-chief of the arts and culture alternative The Walleye Magazine and lives outside Thunder Bay, Ontario.

Five Stalks of Grain: In 1932, as famine rages across Ukraine, the Soviet government calls for the harshest punishment for those who keep for themselves even five stalks of grain. When their mother is accused of hoarding and summarily killed, Nadia and Taras must leave their home on a desperate quest for survival.

Attempting to navigate a closed country, to stay together, and to stay alive, Nadia and Taras must face secret police, soldiers, and fellow citizens forced to abandon charity and sometimes even humanity in the face of impossible hunger. Unsure who to trust and unable to find refuge, they search for somewhere, anywhere, where they can be safe.

Historical fiction at its finest, Five Stalks of Grain is powerfully written and beautifully illustrated, drawing on Ukrainian artistic traditions to tell a story of loss, grief, and hardship with delicate strength. It is a record of a time of profound suffering and a reckoning with the human cost of a tragedy shaped by politics and policy.

Alexandra Diaz  is the award-winning children’s book author of The Only Road and its sequel, The Crossroads, and also Santiago’s Road Home and Farewell Cuba, Mi Isla. Along with her mother, she translated the four books into Spanish, El único destino, La encrucijada, La travesía de Santiago, and Hasta siempre Cuba, mi isla. The Only Road is the recipient of multiple awards, including the Pura Belpré Honor and Américas Award, among others. It tells the story of twelve-year-old Jaime as he makes the treacherous and life-changing journey from his home in Guatemala to live with his older brother in the United States in this gripping and realistic middle-grade novel. Inspired by true events, The Only Road is an individual story of a boy who feels that leaving his home and risking everything is his only chance for a better life. It is a story of fear and bravery, love and loss, strangers becoming family, and one boy’s treacherous and life-changing journey.

Diaz’s other books include Good Girls Don’t Lie (a New Mexico-Arizona Book Award finalist and International Latino Book Award 2nd-place winner) and Of All the Stupid Things (a New Mexico-Arizona Book Award finalist and ALA Rainbow List book), both for young adults.

An overactive imagination had Diaz making up stories at an early age and led to getting an MA in Writing for Young People from Bath Spa University. The daughter of Cuban refugees, she is a native Spanish speaker who currently lives in Santa Fe, NM.

Santiago’s Road Home: The coins in Santiago’s hand are meant for the bus fare back to his abusive abuela’s house. Except he refuses to return; he won’t be missed. His future is uncertain until he meets the kind, maternal María Dolores and her young daughter, Alegría, who help Santiago decide what comes next: He will accompany them to el otro lado, the United States of America. They embark with little, just backpacks with water and a bit of food. To travel together will require trust from all parties, and Santiago is used to going it alone. None of the three travelers realizes that the journey through Mexico to the border is just the beginning of their story.

Keynote speaker: B. Venkat Mani is Professor of German and World Literatures and currently the Race, Ethnicity and Indigeneity (REI) Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Research in the Humanities.

He is the author of Cosmopolitical Claims: Turkish German Literatures from Nadolny to Pamuk (University of Iowa Press, 2007) and Recoding World Literature: Libraries, Print Culture, and Germany’s Pact with Books (Fordham UP, 2017; winner of German Studies Association’s DAAD Prize and Modern Language Association’s Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Best Book in German Studies 2018).

Mani has received research fellowships and grants from the Social Science Research Council; the Andrew Mellon Foundation’s Sawyer Seminar Grant; the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation’s Experienced Researcher Fellowship; the US Department of Education’s Title VI Grant for Center for South Asia; and a DAAD grant for UW’s Center for German and European Studies.

Moderator: Sara McKinnon is Professor of Rhetoric, Politics & Culture in the Department of Communication Arts, and the Faculty Director of the Latin American, Caribbean, and Iberian Studies Program at UW-Madison. She is also the co-chair of the Human Rights Program, with affiliations in the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies and Chican@ & Latin@ Studies.

Her current research examines foreign policy rhetoric in an era of globalization, considering as case studies collaborations between the United States, Mexico, and Central American countries since the 1980s to address regional issues such as drug trafficking, corruption, and migration. She is also working on a collaborative project to expand the information about US immigration and refugee programs and legal counsel available to migrants throughout Latin America as they consider safe options for movement and resettlement.

McKinnon’s books include Gendered Asylum: Race and Violence in U.S. Law and Politics (University of Illinois Press, 2016), which charts the incorporation of protections for survivors of gender- and sexuality-based persecution in U.S. refugee and asylum law, and Text + Field: Innovations in Rhetorical Method (Penn State University Press, 2016), which considers a range of approaches for using ethnographic and field-based methods in doing rhetorical research.

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Filmmaker Biographies:

Carlos Hagerman. Director and producer. He was part of the team of directors of Alejandro González Iñárritu’s production company before opening his own company with which he has produced and directed documentaries such as Los que se quedan (IDA, Humanitas Prize 2009), Vuelve a la vida and El patio de mi casa. He also co-produced Plaza de la soledad (Official Selection Sundance 2013) and Rush Hour (SXSW 2018).

Jorge Villalobos: Director, screenwriter and producer. He has made more than 20 short films and TV series of fiction, animation and documentaries. He directed several children’s series for national public television. His works have participated in the film festivals of Cannes, Annecy, Amsterdam (IDFA), Huelva, Havana, Sao Paulo, Guadalajara, New York, Chile and San Diego, among many others. He has published 3 books, two as a writer and one as an illustrator. Winner of the Ariel (Mexican Oscar) for best animated feature film. He is an active member of the Sistema Nacional de Creadores.

Since Carlos and Jorge founded Brinca Taller in 2012, they have teamed up to co-produce and co-direct animated children’s projects and communication tools for human rights organizations such as UNICEF and the Mexican Commission for the Defense and Promotion of Human Rights.

Home is Somewhere Else is Brinca’s first animated feature-length documentary and the first of its kind in Mexico.