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Author Event: Roohi Choudhry and Serkan Gorkemli
Roohi Choudhry, author of Outside Women, and Serkan Görkemli, author of Sweet Tooth and Other Stories, will be at The Reading Room on Sunday September 28 at 2 pm for an author talk and book signing! Come meet two debut authors with incisive perspectives and fresh voices. Hear them both read excerpts and then be in conversation, followed by time for them to sign your own copy of these fantastic books. Come support ReRead Books, Ball & Socket Arts, and these two authors! Reserve your free spot for the reading and pre-order one or both books at this link.
About Outside Women:
Would you risk your own life to pursue justice for a stranger? Two migrant women—separated by geographies and generations—face this same devastating choice.
Lured away from her home in 1890s India, Sita is brought to South Africa as an indentured servant—one among millions funneled by the British to replace the recently abolished slave trade. One hundred years later, Hajra, a Pakistani scholar, is forced to flee to New York City from her home in Peshawar after witnessing a violent act meant to target her. She loses herself in academic research until she comes face-to-face with a photo of a laughing, defiant young woman brandishing a banner in protest. Inexorably drawn to this woman, Hajra travels to South Africa to learn more and unknowingly traces Sita’s path.
With raw imagery and rich sensory detail, Roohi Choudhry’s incandescent debut novel Outside Women intertwines the narratives of two women painfully yet valiantly carving their existences outside of patriarchal and colonial spaces as they search for kinship and strength in solidarity.
About Sweet Tooth:
Queerness, labels, and allyship are central themes in this moving collection of stories set in Turkey, where Middle Eastern and Euro-American expressions of identity collide and naming one’s orientation is a fraught endeavor. An eleven-year-old undergoes hand surgery that will allow him to wear a wedding ring in adulthood. Two college roommates reach an erotic understanding as they indulge in dessert. A sex worker travels with an American same-sex marriage activist through the Aegean countryside. A passionate hookup during Istanbul Pride ends in tear gas. Two friends’ tempers flare over cold red wine on a hot summer night by the Dardanelles. A father bonds with his son and his son’s drag-queen boyfriend over classic Turkish cinema on the Mediterranean coast.
In Sweet Tooth and Other Stories, Serkan Görkemli weaves together interconnected narratives of four Turkish characters—Hasan, Gökhan, Nazlı, and Cenk—who search for clarity, love, and acceptance amid social change. Set in a rich mixture of urban and rural locales, the stories take place from the 1980s through the 2010s against the backdrop of Turkey’s transition from military-backed secularism to the rise of the religious right, local and global media representations of queer individuals and culture, and the emergence of affirming LGBTQ+ identities. Görkemli creates a complex, engaging network of plots about his characters’ struggles and triumphs in navigating families, communities, and themselves. Braving discrimination, they strive to embrace their identities and find joy, solace, and approval within a society that marginalizes who they are and how they love.
About the Authors:
Roohi Choudhry is a writer, teaching artist, and researcher who lives in Brooklyn, New York. Born in Pakistan and raised in southern Africa, she holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Michigan and is the recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship and residencies at Hedgebrook and Djerassi. She worked as a researcher in criminal justice reform and public health, wrote for the United Nations, and facilitates creative writing workshops for interfaith groups, schools, libraries, and community organizations. Her stories and essays have appeared in Ploughshares, Callaloo, Longreads, and the Kenyon Review. Her debut novel, Outside Women (University Press of Kentucky, March 2025), was named one of the “most anticipated feminist books of 2025” by Ms. Magazine and described as “riveting… an incisive story of how change happens” by Publishers’ Weekly.
Serkan Görkemli, who is originally from Turkey, is an associate professor of English at the University of Connecticut in Stamford. His first book, Grassroots Literacies: Lesbian and Gay Activism and the Internet in Turkey, won the 2015 Conference on College Composition and Communication’s Lavender Rhetorics Book Award. His short fiction has appeared in Ploughshares, the Iowa Review, Epiphany, X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine, Joyland, Foglifter, and Chelsea Station.