MFAW-WA faculty member Keenan Norris has interviewed another MFAW-WA faculty member Micheline Aharonian Marcom about her work as Creative Director of the New American Story Project (NASP). The NASP is a collaboration of artists presenting oral histories and stories of immigrants and refugees in order to bear witness, raise awareness, and provoke transformative conversation.
Here’s the opening:
“In a café like every other Bay Area café—with a charismatic owner, a perfectly sunlit patio, as many expensive chai lattes as one can consume, and Latino laborers doing the dirty work in between and underneath tables and out of sight (though not earshot)—in the alleyway on the other side of a leaf-covered fence where they break down boxes, bail waste and banter in different dialects of Spanish, the novelist Micheline Aharonian Marcom explains why she founded the New American Story Project (NASP). She expounds what exactly the project, and its flagship program, “Welcome Children,” are doing in Oakland and San Francisco.”
