Ru Freeman is an award-winning Sri Lankan born writer and activist whose creative and political work has appeared internationally, including in the UK Guardian, The Boston Globe, and the New York Times. She is the author of the essay collection Bon Courage: Essays on Inheritance, Citizenship & A Creative Life (2023), the short story collection, Sleeping Alone (2022), and the novels A Disobedient Girl (2009), and On Sal Mal Lane (2013), a NYT Editor’s Choice Book. Both novels have been translated into multiple languages including Italian, French, Turkish, Dutch, and Chinese. She is editor of the anthology, Extraordinary Rendition: (American) Writers on Palestine (2016), which gathers the voices of 65 American poets and writers speaking about America’s dis/engagement with Palestine, and Indivisible: Global Leaders on Shared Security (2019). She holds an MFA from Rutgers University, an MA in labor studies, researching female migrant labor in the countries of Kuwait, the U.A.E, and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and has worked at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, DC, in the South Asia office of the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL/CIO), and the American Friends Service Committee in their humanitarian and disaster relief programs. She is a contributing editorial board member of the Asian American Literary Review, and a fellow of the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, Yaddo, Hedgebrook, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the Lannan Foundation. She teaches creative writing internationally.
Favorite Books
Fiction:
- Colum McCann, Apeirogon, Transatlantic
- Ocean Vuong, On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous
- Jamaica Kincaid, See Now Then
- Alessandro Baricco, Silk
- Javier Marias, Thus Bad Begins
- Isabella Hammad, The Parisienne
- Barbara Kingsolver, Poisonwood Bible
- Barry Unsworth, Sacred Hunger
- Jhumpa Lahiri, The Interpreter of Maladies
- Lynn Freed, Home Ground
- Rohinton Mistry, A Fine Balance, Family Matters
- Justin Torres, We the Animals
- Jesamyn Ward, Salvage the Bones
- Ursula Hegi, Stones From the River
- T. Corraghessan Boyle, The Tortilla Curtain
- Toni Morrison, Sula, Tar Baby
- Vikram Seth, The Golden Gate
- Wendell Barry, The Memory of Old Jack
Nonfiction:
- Ted Conover, New Jack
- Michael Collier, Make Us Wave Back
- Anne Lamott, Bird By Bird
- Michael Ondaatje, Running In the Family
Poetry:
- Terrance Hayes, American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin
- John Freeman, Maps
- Reginald Dwayne Betts, Felon
- Natalie Diaz, Postcolonial Love Poem
- Michael Collier, My Bishop and Other Poems
- Catherine Barnett, Into Perfect Spheres Such Holes are Pierced
- Mahmoud Dharwish, Unfortunately It Was Paradise
- Yehuda Amichai, Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai
My family:
- Gamini Seneviratne, Twenty Five Poems: une vie brève mais intense
- Malinda Seneviratne, Epistles