On September 13th, Chinese writer Liao Yiwu will appear in New York City for a reading, a musical performance and an on-stage interview organized by the Pen American Center.

Liao is a poet, novelist, musician, and documentarian, once dubbed “the Studs Terkel of China.” The event will take place on the night before the official release of his new book God Is Red: The Secret Story of How Christianity Survived and Flourished in Communist China. Wen Huang translated the book.

Here’s more from the release: “[Mr. Liao] was denied permission to travel to New York for the PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature earlier this year, but escaped to Berlin via the Vietnamese border on July 6, 2011. Mr. Liao was imprisoned for four years in the 1990s for his epic poem ‘Massacre [excerpted here],’ a condemnation of the government’s bloody crackdown at Tiananmen Square, and has endured constant harassment since. Though all his books are banned in China, he has continued to write.”

Midnight’s Children author Sir Salman Rushdie and New Yorker writer Philip Gourevitch will also be appearing with Liao. For more details about the event, follow this link.