Ru Freeman

Instructor

Ru Freeman is an award-winning Sri Lankan born writer and activist whose creative and political work has appeared internationally, including in the UK Guardian, The Boston Globe, and the New York Times. She is the author of the essay collection Bon Courage: Essays on Inheritance, Citizenship & A Creative Life (2023), the short story collection, Sleeping Alone (2022), and the novels A Disobedient Girl (2009), and On Sal Mal Lane (2013), a NYT Editor’s Choice Book. Both novels have been translated into multiple languages including Italian, French, Turkish, Dutch, and Chinese. She is editor of the anthology, Extraordinary Rendition: (American) Writers on Palestine (2016), which gathers the voices of 65 American poets and writers speaking about America’s dis/engagement with Palestine, and Indivisible: Global Leaders on Shared Security (2019). She holds an MFA from Rutgers University, an MA in labor studies, researching female migrant labor in the countries of Kuwait, the U.A.E, and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and has worked at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, DC, in the South Asia office of the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL/CIO), and the American Friends Service Committee in their humanitarian and disaster relief programs. She is a contributing editorial board member of the Asian American Literary Review, and a fellow of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Yaddo, Hedgebrook, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the Lannan Foundation. She teaches creative writing internationally.