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Join acclaimed author Gregory Orfalea as he reads from and discusses his new book "Angeleno Days: An Arab American Writer on Family, Place, and Politics."

With more than 400,000 Arab Americans, Los Angeles probably surpasses Detroit as the largest contingent in America. Orfalea explores his own LA community and its political and social concerns. He agonizes over another destruction of Lebanon and examines in searing detail a massacre of civilians in Iraq. He also tells stories of his life, taking on progressively more difficult and painful subjects, finally confronting the memories of the shooting tragedy that took the lives of his father and sister.

Orfalea was born and raised in LA and educated at Georgetown University and the University of Alaska. He has taught at several colleges, including the Claremont Colleges, George Washington University and Georgetown University, where he currently teaches Arab American Literature. He is the author of two acclaimed histories, "The Arab Americans: A History" and "Messengers of the Lost Battalion." His work has been widely anthologized in such places as the "Norton Introduction to Poetry," "Imagining America," and "Multiculturalism in the United States," and has won several awards and grants. He has appeared on PBS , the History Channel, and C-SPAN.