Miami is a city where many have come to make a fresh start. Soon, international writers persecuted in their home countries may look to the Magic City for the same sort of rejuvenation.

Cities of Refuge North America, a nonprofit group that helps persecuted writers around the globe find safe havens in the United States, is networking with local colleges, donors and the literary community to establish Miami as the fourth city in its network, after Las Vegas, Pittsburgh and Ithaca, N.Y..

''Miami would be a great city for this,'' says novelist Russell Banks, who helped launch Cities of Refuge North America in 2003. ``It's so multicultural, multiethnic and multinational. It sits right there, looking south to the Caribbean and South America. It has big, powerful and engaged institutions like Miami Dade College and people like [Books & Books owner] Mitchell Kaplan who are really interested in this.''

To drum up interest in the effort, Banks and a group of writers who have sought asylum through Cities of Refuge will host an ''Evening with . . .'' program of readings and performances on Friday at Miami Dade College for Miami Book Fair International.

EUROPEAN ROOTS

Cities of Refuge is modeled after a similar program founded in Europe in 1994 by, among others, Salman Rushdie, the Indian-British novelist whose 1988 work, The Satanic Verses, led to a fatwa, or death sentence, issued by Iran's Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who declared the book blasphemous against Islam.

Rushdie helped establish Cities of Refuge with Banks and the Nigerian Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka.

The program works as ''a grass-roots organization'' in each city, Banks says, drawing resources from private donations, universities and corporate sponsors who provide the writers with housing, a $2,500 monthly stipend and other amenities for up to two years.

Cities of Refuge locates persecuted writers in collaboration with International PEN, PEN American Center and other organizations.

''Then we negotiate with individual cities and make a fit with the writer and city where we have an opening,'' Banks says from New York.

Currently, Cities of Refuge offers asylum to four writers and hopes to place another seven, including the Cuban writer José Prats Sariol. Since 2003, the program has hosted five writers, some of whom have remained in exile in the United States and others who have returned home.

DANGEROUS WORK

Banks says writing can be a perilous craft around the world, particularly in Asia and the Middle East, though writers in Africa, the Caribbean and South America also are persecuted. Between January and June 2006, 19 writers were murdered, 33 had received death threats and 142 were imprisoned, according to International PEN's Writers in Prison Committee.

That's the same year the Georgian novelist, poet and performer Irakli Kakabadze was arrested four times in his native country, he says, for ``my talking against human rights violations, against military preparations, and against the Iraq War also, and lots of different things that the Georgian government didn't like.''

Now under the auspices of the Cities of Refuge in Ithaca, Kakabadze is a visiting scholar in Cornell University's Peace Studies program. At the fair, he will read from his works and perform part of an ongoing project called Polyphonic Blues, in which several people read different narratives to music in an effort to create a singular work.

''It's a kind of musical and poetic way to express diversity,'' Kakabadze says from New York, ``different voices singing a different song at the same time and creating one song.''

He says the idea, which originates from the Georgian tradition of polyphonic folksongs, has an application in conflict resolution, an area with which Kakabadze is intimately familiar on personal and academic levels. He holds a graduate degree in conflict analysis and resolution from George Mason University in Virginia and was a leader of the Georgian student opposition to the Soviet government in the late 1980s.

As a teenager who had fallen in with gangs, Kakabadze embraced a violent lifestyle that led, he says, to his being stabbed several times in street fights. Then in 1989, Kakabadze says, he witnessed the massacre of 16 men and women by the state military in Georgia, and ``that's when I became pacifist.''

''The whole thing about this is we want to overcome this notion of the dominant voice,'' Kakabadze says of Polyphonic Blues. 'Sometimes in the mainstream Western discourse, if there is no one dominant voice, we say, `Oh, this is chaotic. This is cacophonous. This is something we don't listen to.' ''

But, he adds, ``The whole point of Polyphonic Blues is it's not a cacophony. . . . There are different voices, equal voices, that are equally beautiful and create one harmonic song.''

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