Laila Lalami with Viet Thanh Nguyen (livestream) Conditional Citizens

Laila Lalami was born in Rabat and educated in Morocco, Great Britain, and the United States. She is the author of four award-winning novels: Secret Son, Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, The Other Americans, and The Moor’s Account. Her essays have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The Nation, Harper’s, The Guardian, and The New York Times. Lalami is a professor of creative writing at the University of California at Riverside. You can follow her on Twitter @LailaLalami.

Viet Thanh Nguyen is a writer, whose novel The Sympathizer won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. He has written and edited a number of other works, and is a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times. He is an English professor at the University of Southern California. You can follow him on Twitter @viet_t_nguyen.