"AIDS Sutra: Untold Stories From India" -- book reading at UCSF

WHAT:

Reading by authors from recently published book, “AIDS Sutra: Untold Stories from India,” followed by discussion and reception.

WHEN:

Thursday, December 11, 2008, 3:00 to 6:00 p.m.

WHERE:

513 Parnassus, UCSF School of Nursing building, Room N-217, UCSF Campus, San Francisco

WHO:

Negar Akhavi, editor, AIDS Sutra: Untold Stories from India, Program Officer with Avahan, the Gates Foundation India AIDS Initiative.

Nalini Jones, author, who will be reading from her essay, “Love in the Time of Positives” from AIDS Sutra, Untold Stories from India, author of the short story collection, What you Call Winter.

Sonia Faleiro, author, who be reading from her essay, “Maarne Ka, Bhagane Ka” from AIDS Sutra, Untold Stories from India, an award-winning journalist and author of the novel, The Girl.  Editor of Vogue India and currently working on a non-fiction book about the bar girls of Bombay.

BACKGROUND:

Avahan, the Indian national HIV prevention initiative established by the Gates Foundation, asked 16 of the finest and most innovative authors of the Indian subcontinent to write essays on different aspects of the challenge of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, seen from distinct perspectives, and from disparate regions of the country.  Even as the contributions excel in literary quality, they also lead us to fuller understanding of the epistemology of the HIV/AIDS epidemic.  The book has been reviewed in the Los Angeles Times and excerpted in The New Yorker.

The event is sponsored by UCSF Global Health Sciences and the UCSF AIDS Research Institute. UCSF is a leading university dedicated to promoting health worldwide through advanced biomedical research, graduate-level education in the life sciences and health professions and excellence in patient care.

CONTACT:

Media interested in covering the event should contact Jeff Sheehy, (415) 597-8165. To arrange interviews with the authors, contact Kate Runde, (212) 572-4987, [email protected].