Day 1, held on May 23, 2025, was a two-hour event featuring three guest authors who discussed how their diverse Pakistani backgrounds shaped their literary work. Their writings ranged from autobiographies to oral histories, prompting conversations on cultural misconceptions, the risks of cultural homogeneity, and the challenge of balancing heritage with a global readership. The speakers included Anam Zakaria, an oral historian and award-winning author of The Footprints of Partition; Haroon Moghul, a writer whose memoir How to Be a Muslim explores youth and identity; and Omar Waraich, a former journalist and Amnesty International’s former Head of South Asia.
Day 2, held on May 30, 2025, was a one-hour event featuring author Rishi Reddi, who discussed her experiences as a South Asian woman and the ways religion and tradition have shaped her life and writing. Reddi, whose debut novel Karma and Other Stories was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, focused on themes central to her work, including immigration, assimilation, injustice, and personal self-discovery.
Day 3, held on June 6, 2025, featured two South Asian women authors who spoke for over an hour about how living in the Northeast shaped their immigrant experiences and influenced recurring motifs in their writing. They discussed working as authors in the region, gendered literary stereotypes, and the themes that consistently appear in their work. The speakers were Chaitali Sen, author of The Pathless Sky, whose fiction explores identity, migration, love, and belonging, and Sorraya Khan, a Fulbright Award recipient known for novels such as Noor, which examine memory, war, identity, and migration.