In 2004, when two Pittsburghers founded Western Pennsylvania’s own outpost of City of Asylum, few had heard of this international network of groups that sheltered writers persecuted in their home countries.
Today, City of Asylum provides sanctuary to not just one writer at a time, as when it began, but several. It’s also grown into one of Pittsburgh’s busiest arts presenters, with multiple free weekly literary readings and live music performances at Alphabet City, on the North Side.
It’s been an eventful 21 years for those co-founders, Henry Reese and Diane Samuels. Until just a few years ago, Reese — known for his wry wit and taste in bow ties — was the group’s volunteer executive director. But in January, he stepped down as board chair, concluding his time in any formal leadership role with City of Asylum.
“Part of the plan in building Alphabet City was that it would become independent of the founders,” Reese said in a recent interview. “And to signal to the world that we've grown up and we are 21 years old. We're adults now,” he quipped.
A talk by Salman Rushdie
In several ways, the group’s story — and Reese’s — has been bound up with that of novelist Salman Rushdie. In the late 1980s, Iran's leader the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, issued a fatwa ordering Muslims to kill Rushdie over his book “The Satanic Verses,” which Khomeini deemed blasphemous.
Rushdie lived in hiding for years. In 1993, he led a group of writers who persuaded several European cities to fund Cities of Asylum programs for endangered writers in exile. It was Rushdie’s 1997 talk in Pittsburgh that inspired Reese, a businessman, and his wife, artist Samuels, to launch City of Asylum here several years later.
Other Cities of Asylum were government-funded, but “We thought that it would be better to be a community-based organization,” one funded by grants and individual donations, Reese said.
Growing into the community
The first resident of the first City of Asylum house, on the North Side’s Sampsonia Way, was Huang Xiang, a Chinese dissident poet who’d spent much of his adult life in prison. Huang painted some of his poems in big Chinese characters on the exterior of the house, and his theatrical reading style inspired the group to begin its annual Jazz Poetry concerts, a collaboration with famed saxophonist and composer Oliver Lake.
The earliest concerts, highlighted by improvised poetry readings with jazz accompaniment, drew hundreds to an outdoor stage on Sampsonia. They continued growing, eventually relocating to a huge tent in nearby West Park, and later evolving into Jazz Poetry Month, a series of smaller events.
Likewise the group’s literary readings, which began with a book launch for “Senselessness,” the first English-language translation of a work by City of Asylum’s second resident writer, Salvadoran author and journalist Horacio Castellanos Moya. The event proved so popular it grew into a series of readings outdoors and in tents, culminating in the renovation of the former Masonic Temple on West North Avenue into Alphabet City, which includes a bookstore, restaurant and a small stage and performance space. It opened in 2016 with a reading by Svetlana Alexievich, a Nobel Prize-winner from Russia.
The residency program, originally designed to provide resident writers with a home, a stipend, legal counsel, medical benefits and access to professional development for two years, expanded.
“We found out that it takes longer for someone to adapt to exile than two years,” Reese said.
There are also more writers. Currently, City of Asylum houses six writers from Ukraine, Sudan, Algeria and Egypt.
Meanwhile, programming has expanded, too, to about 150 programs a year, with local and visiting writers and local and touring musicians as well as the annual LitFest.
Recent and upcoming visitors have included famed novelists Richard Powers and Caryl Phillips.
Looking ahead
Salman Rushdie, who provided the original spark for City of Asylum nearly three decades ago, continues to be a presence. He has visited the group over the years, and in August 2022 he was to be in conversation on stage with Reese at New York’s famed Chatauqua Institution when a man wielding a knife attacked him, apparently attempting to carry out the decades-old fatwa. Reese was among those who shielded Rushdie and likely saved his life. (Both Reese and Rushdie testified last week at the assailant's criminal trial, in upstate New York.)
And in 2023, City of Asylum hired a former employee of Rushdie’s at the New York City-based PEN World Voices Festival as City of Asylum’s new executive director. Reese said it was the hiring of Caro Llewellyn, and her continued apparent comfort in the role, that made him feel it was time to step down as board chair.
Reese characterized City of Asylum’s founding and the 2022 attack as a pointed “bookending."
He called the attack “a dramatic reminder that what we're doing is much needed. That when the paragon of creative freedom in many ways, someone who is one of the best writers in the world, who has been persecuted for his writing, is attacked in the United States in front of 1,500 people in an institution where creative expression and defending it is a core value, it shakes you up. It reminds you how necessary it is for the organization to go beyond yourself.”
