Author Joanna Eleftheriou joins HUC members for a lecture about her memoir, a collection of essays titled, This Way Back: From New York to Cyprus and Back, on Thursday, February 10, at 7 p.m. Joanna moved from New York City to a Greek-Cypriot village, a journey dramatically captured as a comingof-age experience for a professional, feminist woman seeking a way to remain part of the Greek Orthodox Church both in the United States and Cyprus. Joanna will read from the essay “Ithacas” and discuss the process of sharing her Greek-Cypriot-American experience with a broad readership and fielding questions such as: What does it mean to go “back home” when you are Greek-American? Are we on a journey back to our Greek and Cypriot homelands, or searching for any place that will make us feel like we belong? How do we keep alive the traditions of our homelands as we emerge as modern Greek-Americans of the twenty-first century?

Joanna is an assistant professor of English at Christopher Newport University, a contributing editor of Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies and a faculty member at the Writing Workshops in Greece. Her essays, short stories, and translations appear regularly in journals including Apalachee Review, Chautauqua, CutBank, Arts and Letters, and The Common. She serves in the Executive Board of the Modern Greek Studies Association and was book review editor for the Journal of Modern Greek Studies.

The Zoom link is here.