Tuesday, Sept. 27, 2022  |  6 p.m.  |  Richland Country Club, 1 Club Dr, Nashville, TN

About the Event: AIER’s Bastiat Society program in Nashville, in partnership with the PERI at MTSU, will host an in-person event with North Korean refugee author, Songmi Han. Songmi is co-author of the recently released book Greenlight to Freedom: A North Korean daughter’s search for her mother and herself.

Raised in the countryside of North Korea, Songmi lived in the part of North Korea that the totalitarian regime hides from the world. She gives an amazing glimpse of the soul crushing reality of daily life in North Korea. Songmi will discuss her daily life in North Korea, “the moment” that triggered her escape, and her dramatic escape to freedom. Songmi will be joined onstage by co-author Casey Lartigue Jr., the co-president and co-founder of Freedom Speakers International (FSI) in South Korea.

The Bastiat Society of Nashville’s speaker series is co-sponsored by The Political Economy Research Institute at MTSU.

About the speakers:

Songmi Han was born in Geumya-gun, Bongsan-ri in the center of North Korea about 240 kilometers (150 miles) from the capital of Pyongyang. She escaped from North Korea in 2011 and settled in South Korea later that year. She is now a college student studying social welfare at a university outside of Seoul, a keynote speaker and special assistant at Freedom Speakers International, and is happy to be living in freedom.

Casey Lartigue Jr. is the co-founder and co-president of Freedom Speakers International in Seoul, Korea. He is a former education policy analyst at the Cato Institute and co-editor of the Cato Institute book Educational Freedom in Urban America: Brown v. Board after Half a Century. He has a bachelor’s degree from the Harvard University Extension School and a master’s degree from the Harvard Graduate School of Education.