March 2, 2023
5:30pm Reception
6pm Book talk followed by Q&A
Chancellor's Hall and Auditorium
CASE Building, 4th floor
Join us for an extraordinary event: a book reading and dialogue with Tsering Yangzom Lama about her award-winning debut novel, We Measure the Earth with Our Bodies, the first novel in English by a Tibetan woman.
Breathtaking in scope and powerfully intimate, We Measure the Earth with Our Bodies is a gorgeously written meditation on colonization, displacement, and the lengths we’ll go to remain connected to our families and ancestral lands. Told through the lives of a family across three generations, this beautifully lyrical debut novel provides a nuanced portrait of the world of Tibetan exiles. We Measure the Earth with Our Bodies, won the 2023 New Writers Award for Fiction from the Great Lakes Colleges Association. A New York Times Summer Reads pick, her novel was shortlisted for The Scotiabank Giller Prize and longlisted for The Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and The Toronto Book Awards.
Tsering Yangzom Lama holds an MFA in Writing from Columbia University where she was a TOMS Fellow, Writing Fellow, and Teaching Fellow. She earned her BA in Creative Writing and International Relations from the University of British Columbia. A lifelong activist, she is a Storytelling Advisor at Greenpeace International, where she guides and trains people around the world in narrative strategy. A recipient of grants from the Canada Council for the Arts and the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, Tsering has been a resident at the Jan Michalski Foundation, Banff Center for Arts and Creativity, Hedgebrook, Willapa Bay AiR, Vermont Studio Center, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Lillian E. Smith Center, Art Omi, Catwalk Institute, WildAcres, and Playa Summerlake. She was selected as a 2018 Tin House Novel Scholar. Tsering’s writing has appeared in The Globe and Mail, The Malahat Review, Grain, Kenyon Review, Vela, LaLit, and Himal SouthAsian, as well as the anthologies Old Demons New Deities: 21 Short Stories from Tibet; House of Snow: An Anthology of the Greatest Writing About Nepal; and Brave New Play Rites. Tsering is also a co-founder of LhakarDiaries, a leading English-language blog among Tibetan youth in exile. Born and raised in Nepal, she currently splits her time between Vancouver, Canada and Sweden.