Just Buffalo Prestents: John Freeman and Omar El Akkad

Join us at Just Buffalo Literary Center for a conversation between authors John Freeman & Omar El Akkad

Doors at 7:00 p.m. | Conversation at 7:30 p.m.

John Freeman is the founder of the literary annual Freeman’s, which has been a finalist for the National magazine award for fiction, and the author and editor of a dozen books, including the poetry collection Wind, Trees, the essay, Dictionary of the Undoing, and the anthology, coedited with Tracy K Smith, There’s a Revolution Outside My Love. He is an executive editor at Alfred A. Knopf and lives in New York City, from where he hosts the California Book Club, a monthly zoom discussion of a new classic in Golden State literature, sponsored by Alta Magazine.

Omar El Akkad is an author and journalist. He was born in Egypt, grew up in Qatar, moved to Canada as a teenager and now lives in the United States. The start of his journalism career coincided with the start of the war on terror, and over the following decade he reported from Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay and many other locations around the world. His work earned a National Newspaper Award for Investigative Journalism and the Goff Penny Award for young journalists.His fiction and non-fiction writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, Le Monde, Guernica, GQ, and many other newspapers and magazines.His debut novel, American War, is an international bestseller and has been translated into thirteen languages. It won the Pacific Northwest Booksellers’ Award, the Oregon Book Award for fiction, the Kobo Emerging Writer Prize, and has been nominated for more than ten other awards. It was listed as one of the best books of the year by The New York Times, Washington Post, GQ, NPR, and Esquire, and was selected by the BBC as one of 100 novels that changed our world.