About this Event
Mother Dearest: Understanding our Mothers
All PEN World Voices Festival tickets are non-refundable. Please confirm the time and location of your event before finalizing your purchase.
As much as we are shaped by mothers, they too are shaped by their times and social milieu.
In three new books, Abdellah Taïa, Gish Jen, and Molly Jong-Fast grapple with their mothers and the complexity of those difficult and loving relationships. In Living in Your Light (tr. Emma Ramadan), Taïa follows three moments in the life of Malika, a Moroccan countrywoman and fictionalized version of his mother, from 1954 to 1999. In Bad Bad Girl, Jen blends autofiction and memoir to trace her mother’s life from her birth in Shanghai in 1924 in an attempt to understand why her mother was so hard on her. Jong-Fast’s memoir How to Lose Your Mother follows a year in the author’s life as she navigates her mother’s dementia and looks back on her sometimes chaotic childhood as the daughter of a celebrity mother.
Moderated by Dalia Azim (Country of Origin), this conversation will traverse Morocco, Shanghai, and 1970s New York City to explore the most fundamental relationship of all: mother and child.
The 2026 PEN World Voices Festival is a celebration of world literature and free expression. The 2026 edition will be the 21st World Voices Festival. Over four days, over 140 writers from over 40 countries will be featured in engaging talks, panels, readings, and activations in New York City and greater Los Angeles.
ACCESSIBILITY:
This space is ADA compliant. A street level accessible entrance is located on 12th street.
ASL interpretation is available for this event by request only. Please reach out to our Box Office team at [email protected] by April 15th to request.
Please ask a Box Office Attendant or festival representative upon arrival for directions to accessible seating if preferred.
For further information on accessibility in this space, or to make a request, please contact [email protected]
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
The Church of the Village, 201 West 13th Street, New York, United States
USD 0.00 to USD 23.18
