By Ethan Markon | Staff Writer

City of Asylum is the iconic Northside asylum organization and bookstore working to promote freedom of expression and speech. The organization was founded in 2004, housing their first asylum seeker that same year.

The building for the bookstore was acquired 10 years ago, but first opened in 2017. City of Asylum’s parent organization, the International Cities of Refuge Network (ICORN), works to promote freedom of expression and offer asylum to journalists, authors, poets, and artists at risk of persecution.

Since the Pittsburgh location’s inception, City of Asylum has housed dozens of individuals in exile through their residencies. Those in countries facing persecution for a work of art they created, a book they published, or a poem they wrote can apply to the ICORN network so they can get connected to an asylum program and find safety elsewhere.

Alexis Jabour, the senior program manager at the organization, listed some of the reasons individuals might reach out to ICORN. When an artist or writer is targeted by the government, private groups, or extremist groups in their home country, they can turn to the network for safety.

“[An] author might get fired from their job, get pressured to be evicted if they’re renting, receive threats to themselves or their family, get arrested, and thrown into prison,” Jabour said.

“It’s a very hard decision to have to leave your home, so factors build up so that life at home becomes so untenable that they would prefer to flee and go to a new place,” he said further.

Check out the September edition of The Northside Chronicle for the full story.