Book Talk: Ross Perlin | Language City
Meet the Speakers
Ross Perlin, Featured Writer
Ross Perlin is a linguist, writer, and translator focused on exploring and supporting linguistic diversity. His book Language City: The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues in New York is out this year from Grove. Since 2013 he has been Co-Director of the Endangered Language Alliance, managing research projects on mapmaking, documentation, policy, and public programming for urban linguistic diversity. He also teaches linguistics at Columbia. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, Harper’s, and elsewhere, and his first book Intern Nation: How to Earn Nothing and Learn Little in the Brave New Economy ignited a national conversation about unpaid work.
Jordan Salama, Moderator
Jordan Salama is the author of Stranger in the Desert, an intergenerational family story that chronicles a journey across Argentina in search of traces of his Syrian Jewish great-grandfather, a traveling salesman in the Andes. His stories about culture and migration in the Americas have appeared in National Geographic, New York Magazine, The New York Times, and other national and international publications. He is also the author of Every Day the River Changes, a river journey through Colombia, which was named a Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2021 and the “Pre-Read” at Princeton University, where he graduated in 2019. He has been based, in recent years, between New York and Buenos Aires.