Miami Hosts Exiled Writer Chenjerai Hove
- Chenjerai Hove/Courtesy of Miami Dade College
In a city of immigrants and exiles, one more newcomer has been unpacking his bags and setting up shop: the acclaimed novelist and poet Chenjerai Hove, from Zimbabwe.
Known as Chen to his friends, he is the author of the best selling novel Bones, and the first writer welcomed to Miami under the Cities of Refuge North America program. Founded in the early 90s, Cities of Refuge cultivates safe havens for persecuted writers around the world, offering a two-year stipend, speaking engagements and even help moving.
As we reported last summer, Miami is the fourth U.S. city to join Cities of Refuge and host a writer. (Las Vegas was the first!) You can listen to that story, which features a Haitian writer who escaped to Miami years ago, by clicking here.
As reported in a recent Miami Herald story, Hove will be a guest of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, with his stay coordinated by the Florida Center for the Literary Arts at Miami Dade College.
In the article, Hove remembers how a man in a lab coat tried to slip him mysterious pills as he recuperated from exhaustion in a Zimbabwe hospital, and how he began working through the night, so he would at least be dressed when police came to arrest him.
Here in Miami, he’s heard there’s a giant African baobab tree at Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden, the article notes, ”and he’d very much like to see it.”
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