Hala Alyan, an award-winning poet, novelist and clinical psychologist, presents Transylvania University’s next Creative Intelligence lecture March 24 on “The Power of Storytelling in War, Memory & Healing.”
Her talk, which is free and open to the public, begins at 6 p.m. in Carrick Theater with a book signing to follow. The event is presented in collaboration with the Bingham Center for Teaching Excellence and Hazelrigg Lecture Series for the Humanities and Social Sciences.
Alyan’s work reckons with themes including displacement, belonging, family and the meaning of home.
Born in Carbondale, Illinois, she grew up in Kuwait, Oklahoma, Texas, Maine and Lebanon. Living in such varied locales informed her novel “Salt Houses,” winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Arab American Book Award. The book was also a finalist for the Chautauqua Prize.
“Hala Alyan shows how we carry our origins in our hearts wherever we may roam, and how that history is calibrated by the places we choose to put down roots,” writer Ru Freeman said about “Salt Houses.” “This is a book with the power to both break and mend your heart.”
Alyan’s latest novel, ”The Arsonists’ City,” was a finalist for the 2022 Aspen Words Literary Prize. Additionally, she wrote five award-winning collections of poetry and a memoir, “I’ll Tell You When I’m Home,” published last June.
She earned a BA from the American University of Beirut and an MA from Columbia University. While completing her doctorate in clinical psychology at Rutgers University, she specialized in the treatment of trauma and addiction.
Alyan and her family live in Brooklyn.
As part of this year’s Creative Intelligence series, her talk expands on the broader theme of “Days of Our Beginnings” based on Crystal Wilkinson’s poem “The Visit.” “Like the speaker in the poem, who imaginatively revisits a childhood moment of intimacy, the series revisits histories — personal, regional, national and global — in order to consider what we may have overlooked or learned incompletely,” said professor and series director Kremena Todorova. “It offers deeper knowledge of the past as we navigate our present moment and as we look toward what lies ahead.”