Note: Jaquira Díaz and Shuchi Saraswat were unable to attend. In their place, co-host Wil Turner and curator/host Ru Freeman read from their work for a warm and memorable evening.
Sunday Salon returns on April 26 with Dark Tower, the reading series curated and hosted by Ru Freeman, born from the legendary Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference tradition and reimagined for New York City, where it has, since 2010, brought urgent and boundary-crossing voices to the stage. This 12th installment features an extraordinary all-women lineup: Hannah Lillith Assadi, Sahar Delijani, Jaquira Díaz, and Shuchi Saraswat, whose fiction and nonfiction traces the intimate and political contours of inheritance, displacement, and memory, and the forces that shape personal histories across generations and geographies. After going virtual in 2020, Dark Tower is back in person for an evening of bold, resonant work. 5pm. Von Bar, 3 Bleecker St.
Hannah Lillith Assadi is the author of the Women’s Prize long-listed novel Paradiso 17 (Knopf 2026), inspired by the life of her late Palestinian father. Her debut novel Sonora (Soho 2017) received the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was a finalist for the PEN/ Robert W. Bingham Prize. Her second novel The Stars Are Not Yet Bells (Riverhead 2022) was named a New Yorker and NPR best book of 2022. She is also the co-editor of an anthology of the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish, which will be published by Everyman’s Library/ Knopf in November 2026. She teaches fiction at the Columbia University School of the Arts and the Pratt Institute. In 2018, she was named a ‘5 under 35’ honoree by the National Book Foundation.
Sahar Delijani is the author of Children of the Jacaranda Tree, an internationally acclaimed novel, translated into thirty-two languages and published in more than seventy-five countries. She is a recipient of the de Groot Foundation COURAGE to WRITE Grant, the Society of Authors and Author’s Foundation Grant, and of fellowships at Hawthornden Foundation, Tin House, Art Omi and Hedgebrook. Delijani has appeared on Democracy Now!, ABC News, Al Jazeera, BBC and NPR to discuss Iran and the political realities of the region. Born in Iran, Delijani lives in New York City. Her second novel, For Every Person You Kill, is forthcoming in Spring 2027.
Jaquira Díaz is the author of Ordinary Girls: A Memoir, winner of a Whiting Award, a Florida Book Awards Gold Medal, a Lambda Literary Awards finalist, a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Selection, an Indie Next Pick, and a finalist for the B&N Discover Prize. She is the recipient of numerous awards including a Letras Boricuas Fellowship, the Jeanne Córdova Prize for Lesbian/Queer Nonfiction, two Pushcart Prizes, an Elizabeth George Foundation grant.Her writing has been included in he Atlantic, The Guardian, Time Magazine, and The New York Times Style Magazine, and been anthologized in The Best American Essays, and The Pushcart Prize anthology. Her debut novel, This Is the Only Kingdom, was longlisted for the Center for Fiction 2025 First Novel Prize. She lives in New York and teaches at Columbia University.
Shuchi Saraswat’s essays have appeared in Ploughshares, Orion, Michigan Quarterly Review, AGNI, Ecotone, and elsewhere, and have received special mentions in The Best American Essays and The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses. In 2024, her novel-in-progress received a grant from the Barbara Deming Memorial Foundation and was shortlisted for the Granum Foundation Prize. She lives in Boston, where she’s the senior editor of AGNI.
Dark Tower Curator & Host:
Ru Freeman is a Sri Lankan and American writer, poet, and activist whose work appears internationally in English and in translation. She is the author of Bon Courage: Essays on Inheritance, Citizenship & A Creative Life (2023), the short-story collection, Sleeping Alone (2022), and the widely translated novels A Disobedient Girl (2009) and On Sal Mal Lane (2013), a New York Times Editor’s Choice Book. She is the editor of the anthology, Extraordinary Rendition: American Writers on Palestine (2015) and co-editor of Indivisible: Global Leaders on Shared Security (2018). She writes for the UK Guardian, the New York Times, and the Boston Globe. She is a winner of the Mariella Gable Award for Fiction, and the JH Kafka Prize for Fiction by an American Woman. She teaches creative writing in the US and abroad.