Guantánamo: Mohamedou Ould Slahi & Larry Siems in Conversation with Adriana E. Ramirez

In 2015, when Mohamedou Ould Slahi was in his 13th year of detention in Guantánamo, City of Asylum hosted journalist and human rights advocate Larry Siems, editor of Mohamedou’s recently published and internationally-acclaimed Guantánamo Diary. The book recounted his “endless world tour” of detention and interrogation. Now, Mohamedou has been a free man for eight years. He’s the recipient of many international honors and human rights awards, he travels and collaborates with arts and rights organizations throughout Europe, and he’s a brand new citizen of the Netherlands…but he’s still barred from traveling to the United States. Undeterred, he joins us live from Amsterdam for a discussion with Larry Siems, moderated by award-winning nonfiction writer, storyteller, critic, and performance poet, Adriana E. Ramírez. The discussion will focus on creativity, resistance, the ongoing dark legacy of the prison camp in Guantánamo, and our never-finished, collective journey to freedom.

About the Speakers:

Mohamedou Ould Slahi Houbeini is an internationally acclaimed author, human rights activist, and speaker with Arab and African roots, currently based in the Netherlands. Born in Rosso, Mauritania, as the ninth of 12 children in a family of camel herders, Mohamedou’s journey is one of extraordinary resilience and triumph over injustice. After moving to Nouakchott as a child, Mohamedou excelled in his studies, earning a scholarship to pursue electrical engineering at Gerhard-Mercator University in Duisburg, Germany. In 2001, while living and working in Mauritania, Mohamedou was unjustly detained and rendered to Jordan, beginning a harrowing 15-year ordeal that included imprisonment in Guantánamo Bay without charge or trial. From the isolation of his cell, he authored the globally bestselling Guantánamo Diary, a powerful account of his experience. The manuscript, classified for nearly eight years, was finally released with heavy redactions in 2013 and published internationally in 2015, now available in over 25 languages. After his release on October 17, 2016, Mohamedou published the “restored edition” of his book, filling in the redactions made by the US government. In 2021, Mohamedou published his first novel, The Actual True Story of Ahmed and Zarga (Ohio University Press). Beyond writing, Mohamedou has collaborated with NNT/NITE to co-write the theater production Yara’s Wedding, inspired by Edward Said’s Orientalism, which premiered in February 2023. Mohamedou’s relentless dedication to peace and justice has earned him prestigious accolades, including the Netherlands’ PAX Peace Prize in 2022 and the Marco Borradori Prize in Lugano, Switzerland, in 2023. Through his writing, activism, and public speaking, Mohamedou continues to advocate for human rights, justice, and reconciliation, inspiring audiences worldwide with his unwavering courage and humanity.

Larry Siems’ career in human rights and free expression advocacy includes 17 years directing Freedom to Write and International Programs for PEN, the international writers’ organization. At PEN, he designed and coordinated global campaigns to protect writers and defend the right of all to freedom of expression, and supported the efforts of writers in more than a dozen countries to defend journalism, literature, and free speech. He has served since 2017 as Chief of Staff at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. Larry is also a writer and journalist who has published widely on immigration, cross-cultural issues, human rights, and free expression violations in the US and around the world. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, Granta, The Nation, Aztlán, Epoch, and Southern Poetry Review. His books include Between the Lines: Letters Between Mexican and Central American Immigrants and Their Families and Friends and The Torture Report: What the Documents Say About America’s Post-9/11 Torture Program. He also edited, annotated, and introduced Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s New York Times bestseller, Guantánamo Diary, which has been published in 27 countries and 22 languages, and collaborated with Mohamedou on his novel, The Actual True Story of Ahmed and Zarga.

About the Moderator: 

Adriana E. Ramírez is a Mexican-Colombian writer, critic, and performance poet based in Pittsburgh. She won the inaugural PEN/Fusion Emerging Writers Prize in 2015 for her novella-length work of nonfiction, Dead Boys (Little A, 2016). Her reviews, essays, and poems have also appeared in The Atlantic, The Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, ESPN’s The Undefeated, Los Angeles Review of Books, Guernica/PEN America, and Literary Hub, among others. She occasionally reviews books for People Magazine. Once a nationally ranked slam poet, she founded the infamous Nasty Slam in Pittsburgh and continues to perform on stages around the country. She and novelist Angie Cruz founded Aster(ix) Journal, a literary journal giving voice to the censored and the marginalized. Her debut full-length work of nonfiction, The Violence, is forthcoming from Scribner.