Fayeza Hasanat, a Bangladeshi-American writer, is a literary scholar who specializes in gender studies, translation studies, and literature of the British Empire and the South Asian diaspora. She teaches in the English Department at UCF.
Set in Bangladesh and the United States, the stories in The Bird Catcher address gender expectations, familial love, and questions of identity and belonging. The characters include a woman who decides, after thirty years of marriage and motherhood, that she wants to walk into the ocean; a college professor whose Bangladeshi accent is ridiculed by a student; and a young woman with a charismatic but exasperating mother-in-law. In the title story, drawing on fairy tale motifs, string theory, and Sufi philosophy, a bird and a recluse argue over the nature of time and the meaning of freedom. The Bird Catcher offers wide-ranging variations on the theme of diasporic identity as well as intriguing glimpses into suppressed, fragmented, and resilient lives
Sponsored by the Women’s and Gender Studies Program in cooperation with the Department of English, Writers in the Sun, and the Cypress Dome Society.
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