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LILRC Webinar: I Kick and I Fly – Ruchira Gupta on Human Trafficking
Join LILRC as we welcome author Ruchira Gupta for a moderated conversation about her Young Adult novel, I Kick and I Fly (Scholastic, 2023), a story of the human trafficking of young girls.
In I Kick and I Fly, Ruchira Gupta has given young readers an irresistible story, and also one that could save lives. This book is a gift.” — Gloria Steinem
“Any work from Ruchira Gupta is sure to further the cause of liberating women, especially, and in this novel, girls. It takes a strong belief in us, and especially in our young ones, to persevere as she does in both art and politics. The absolute belief that if the heart is moved, so might be the positive activities for justice and freedom of the mind.” — Alice Walker, author of The Color Purple
“I Kick and I Fly is a powerhouse of a debut. Ruchira Gupta has crafted a page-turner of a read, stepped in place and full of indelible characters, managing to be at once propulsive and enlightening, infuriating and inspiring. But maybe most important, Heera’s story is a beacon of hope to a generation of young people trying to transform an unjust world.” — Gayle Forman, New York Times bestselling author of If I Stay and We Are Inevitable
Ruchira Gupta is an Emmy winning journalist and founder of the anti sex trafficking NGO, Apne Aap that helps women and girls exit systems of prostitution. I Kick and I Fly is her debut fiction novel.
Ruchira has been given the French Ordre National du Mérite, Clinton Global Citizen Award, and the UN NGO CSW Woman of Distinction among other honors for her contribution to the establishment of the UN Trafficking Fund for Survivors, the passage of the US Trafficking Victims Protection Act and her grassroots activism with Apne Aap. She holds a Doctor of Humane Letters from Smith College. Ruchira has worked for the United Nations in Nepal, Thailand, Kosovo, Iran, and USA. She teaches occasionally as a visiting professor at New York University. She divides her time between New York and Forbesganj, her childhood home in the foothills of the Himalayas, where she paints her mother’s garden.