SANCTUARIES
A NIGHT OF STORYTELLING
Tuesday, May 20th at 3pm PT | 5pm CT | 6pm ET
Join us for an evening of art, storytelling, healing, and community—featuring powerful and intimate readings from Sylvia Nasreen Chowdhury, Fariha Róisín, and Sahaj Kohli. In the midst of all that we’re carrying, we hope this gathering can be a healing balm and a reminder that we’re not alone.
The evening’s proceeds will be donated to the Murmurations Movement Fund, a fund to directly support South Asian survivors and community-based organizations.
If cost is a barrier, email us at hello@southasiansoar.org for more accessible ticket options.
Sanctuaries is both an offering and an urgent invitation: to believe and stand with survivors, cultivate healing, and join the movement for a future free of violence.
In these stories, we invite you to find your own.
Sanctuaries is an anthology of 20 South Asian Survivor Stories published by South Asian SOAR.
Featuring
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Sylvia Nasreen Chowdhury, M.A (she/her) is a multidisciplinary artist, poet, and ethnographic researcher whose work explores the entanglements of language, identity, performance, mobility, and liberation. Her justice-driven, community-based research centers discourse communities and feminist praxis across South Asian diasporas, illuminating the sociopolitical and ideological contacts, frictions and transformations that emerge from such intersectional, storied positionings.
Sylvia is a doctoral student in the English Department at the University of Washington, where she teaches critical trauma literature and creative narrative writing. Across mediums, Sylvia’s practice centers memory, sensation, and the body as critical sites of knowledge production. Her first collection of prose and poetry, Slow, Fruit, is a mythobiography that traces lineages of family and loss, grief and desire, gender and genealogy.
Born and raised in New York City, Sylvia lives in the Olympic Rainforest, where her hands are usually covered in flour, clay, paint, or ink.
Contact Information:
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Sahaj Kaur Kohli MA.Ed, LGPC, NCC (she/her) is an award-winning individual and couples therapist, an advice columnist for the Washington Post, author of “But What Will People Say: Navigating Mental Health, Identity, Love and Family Between Cultures,” and host of her new podcast So We’ve Been Told.
In 2019, Sahaj founded Brown Girl Therapy, the first and largest mental health and wellness community for adult children of immigrants. In this capacity, Sahaj aims to democratize and decolonize mental health and infuse culture into our overall wellness conversations. In 2024, Sahaj was named a Verywell Mind 25 Honoree and in 2025 she received the prestigious Vanguard Award from Psychotherapy Networker for her early, significant contributions to the field of psychotherapy.
With a 6+ year career in journalism under her belt, Sahaj’s passion lies at the intersection of narrative storytelling and mental health advocacy. Sahaj’s words and work have been featured in Today, Good Morning America, CNN, The New York Times, HuffPost, and others. Sahaj also serves as a consultant, mental health educator and international speaker.
Contact Information:
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Fariha Róisín (they/them) is a writer, culture worker, and educator.
Born in Ontario, Canada, they were raised in Sydney, Australia, and are based in Los Angeles, California. As a Muslim queer Bangladeshi, they are interested in the margins, liminality, otherness, and the mercurial nature of being. Their work has pioneered a refreshing and renewed conversation about wellness, contemporary Islam, degrowth and queer identities and has appeared in Al Jazeera, The Guardian, Vice, Village Voice, and others.
Róisín has published a book of poetry entitled How To Cure A Ghost (Abrams), a journal called Being In Your Body (Abrams), and a novel named Like A Bird (Unnamed Press) which was named one of the Best Books of 2020 by NPR, Globe and Mail, Harper’s Bazaar, a must-read by Buzzfeed News and received a starred review by the Library Journal. Their first work of non-fiction Who Is Wellness For? An Examination of Wellness Culture and Who it Leaves Behind (HarperWave) was released in 2022, and their second book of poetry Survival Takes A Wild Imagination came out Fall of 2023.
They are a member of Writers Against The War on Gaza.
Contact Information:
Murmurations Movement Fund
Join us in protecting critical services at a critical time.
All proceeds from the event will go to the Murmurations Movement Fund—the first fund of its kind providing direct support to South Asian anti-violence organizations as they face significant threats to their sustainability:
95% of organizations report severe losses or reductions in funding
76% are experiencing surging demand for services, and
62% are facing staff burnout and retention crises.*
Without urgent and sustained funding, critical survivor services will disappear. The time to step up is now.
SOAR will distribute 100% of raised funds as timely and direct financial support where it’s needed most, so no organization has to shutter its doors.
If you can’t join this event, you can still contribute to the Murmurations Movement Fund today!