Join us for a conversation with journalist Amy Yee, author of Far From the Rooftop of the World, as she shares her experience documenting the stories of Tibetans in exile. Her storytelling journey began with a hug and request from the Dalai Lama in March 2008 when she was a Financial Times reporter in India. At the time, China was cracking down on Tibetan protesters after demonstrations in Tibet turned violent. That encounter with the Dalai Lama was the start of 14 years of work across four continents spotlighting those exiled from their homeland.

While there are many books written about the Dalai Lama and Tibet, few focus on how ordinary Tibetans abroad are living and handling the extraordinary challenges of sustaining their identity and preserving culture even in exile and amid forced migration.

Amy Yee will be joined in conversation with Tsewang Rigzin, former deputy director of The Tibet Fund in Dharamsala, India and author of The Exile Tibetan Community: Problems and Prospects.

Far From the Rooftop of the World will be available for purchase for this event.

Click here to read the foreword to Far From the Rooftop of the World by His Holiness the Dalai Lama.

Click here to read the prologue to Far From the Rooftop of the World, "A Hug from the Dalai Lama" by the author Amy Yee.

Speakers

Amy Yee is an award-winning journalist, most recently with Bloomberg/CityLab and previously a Financial Times correspondent in New York and India where she lived for seven years. She has written for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Economist, NPR and 30+ media outlets. She has won three awards from the United Nations Correspondents Association; four from the South Asian Journalists Association; and first place from the Association of Healthcare Journalists for analysis about reducing deaths of children in India and Bangladesh. In 2023 she won the Asian American Journalists Association’s award for political reporting about protecting voting rights of immigrant voters, and a Society of Professional Journalists award for racial equity reporting. She has had four Notable Essays in the Best American Essays. She has reported from 20+ countries, including ten in Africa. She is a MacDowell and Logan Nonfiction Fellow and a graduate of Harvard Kennedy School, Columbia Journalism School, Wellesley and Hunter's MFA program.

Tsewang Rigzin (moderator) is the author of The Exile Tibetan Community: Problems and Prospects published by the Library of Tibetan Works and Archives, and currently works as a city research scientist in the Mayor’s office of New York City. Formerly, he was Deputy Director at The Tibet Fund. He was born in Tibet and escaped to India as a refugee in 1992 when he was ten years old. He did his early schooling at Tibetan Children's Village School, Dharamshala, India. He earned Bachelor's and Master's degrees from Mangalore University, India, where he was President of the Regional Tibetan Youth Congress and the Tibetan Student Association. In 2012, he was selected for the Tibetan Scholarship Program. He earned a Masters's from Emory University in 2015. In 2023 he earned a PhD from Columbia in social policy and economics.