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Elena Georgiou Book Launch: "The Immigrant's Refrigerator"

Award-winning poet Elena Georgiou celebrates the launch of her book of short stories, The Immigrant's Refrigerator, with a reading, book signing & talk with Laurie Stavrand, Community Partnership Coordinator at Vermont Refugee Resettlement Program (VRRP).

Elena and Laurie will discuss immigration and how it affects one's story of oneself. 

10% of the book sales from this event will be donated to VRRP, which helps refugees begin new lives in Vermont.

Free and open to the public. Proud to be a Vermont Arts 2018 event, part of the Vermont Arts Council.

About the author
Elena Georgiou is the author of the short-story collection The Immigrant’s Refrigerator (GenPop Books, 2018), and the poetry collections Rhapsody of the Naked Immigrants (Harbor Mountain Press) and mercy mercy me (University of Wisconsin), which won a Lambda Literary Award and was a finalist for the Publishing Triangle Award. She is also co-editor (with Michael Lassell) of the poetry anthology, The World In Us (St. Martin’s Press).

Georgiou has won an Astraea Emerging Writers Award, a New York Foundation of the Arts Fellowship, and was a fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Her work appears in journals such as BOMB, Cream City Review, Denver Quarterly, Gargoyle, Lumina, MiPoesia, and Spoon River Review. She is an editor at Tarpaulin Sky Press and the Director of the MFA in Creative Writing program at Goddard College.

Georgiou is originally from London, England, where she spent the first twenty-seven years of her life.  Since then, she has lived in the US — first in New York, now in Vermont. 

About Laurie Stavrand
Laurie Stavrand has been the Community Partnership Coordinator for USCRI/VRRP for nine years. During that time Laurie has had the privilege to help resettle refugees in Vermont whose home countries are Bhutan, Burma, Burundi, Cuba, Democratic Republic of Congo, Eritrea, Iraq, Rwanda, Somalia, Sudan and Syria. She has expanded programs at USCRI/VRRP including the Crossroads Youth Mentorship Program in partnership with Play in the Wild! and the Mosaic of Flavors Cooking Class in partnership with City Market. Laurie has expanded public outreach and education including the Destination BTV annual fundraiser shows at the Burlington Airport and the refugee simulation ‘The Refugee Journey’ board game. She is grateful for the opportunity to work with and get to know so many amazing people. 

About the book
Fiction. Short Stories. GenPop Books, 2018

If luck is on an author’s side, a book reaches its audience at the right time. Elena Georgiou’s The Immigrant’s Refrigerator can confidently make this claim. Populated with a cast of characters that shine the light on what it means to be an outsider in the early part of the 21st century, this story collection takes its reader into the private lives of those who have entered a country legally, others who were forced to enter illegally, and the rest who call a country home as a result of birth; characters searching for what they need to sustain them on their journeys towards a future that will not only be a place of refuge, but also one of hope.

"Elena Georgiou is a dazzlingly good writer. The thirteen stories in The Immigrant’s Refrigerator are stirring, wise, and keenly alert to the longings and contradictions that impel their beguiling characters. I loved this collection."

—John McManus, author of Fox Tooth Heart and Bitter Milk

"Although immigrants aren’t the sole characters in Georgiou’s collection, they are the thread that binds its 12 quiet, yet powerful stories. Many are fleeing violence, like the Irish writer in the title story who’s running from the war that tore apart his family, or the Somali man living in Maine after years spent in a refugee camp. But some are just trying to fulfill the promise of a better life, like the Bolivian woman forced to work as a cleaning woman and a stripper to provide for her child. Georgiou uses repetitive imagery to tie the stories together along with themes of displacement and loneliness. What elevates this collection is that it is just as often the American characters in their own homeland who experience these feelings as they’re searching for the elusive thing called home or, more likely, simple human connection. It is this mutual longing that shows characters’ shared humanity and the compassion and kindness that can help overcome differences. Georgiou’s timely collection will appeal to any reader interested in immigration issues."

—Booklist

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Date: 04/24/2018
Time: 7:00pm - 8:00pm
Place:

77 Main St
Montpelier, VT 05602
United States