Tsitsi Dangarembga and Assistant Professor of English and Humanities Ernest Mitchell discuss the hundreds of black and white photographs Richard Wright took in 1953 during a ten-week visit to West Africa to research his book Black Power (1954), an account of the Gold Coast’s transition to the independent nation of Ghana.
Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu talks with Professor of English Stephanie Newell about the ways her life and fiction engage with the seismic cultural changes that have taken place in Zimbabwe since the 1970s.
Two of today’s most innovative fiction writers—André Alexis and Laird Hunt—discuss fiction, fable, and form in this wide-ranging discussion on the art of writing.
Margo Jefferson spent most of her brilliant career as a critic for major magazines and newspapers before transitioning into writing that combines her critical acumen with personal narrative in thrilling ways. In this talk and conversation with Daphne A. Brooks, William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of African American Studies, American Studies, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and Music, Margo discusses how the personal is an essential element of the critical, and vice-versa.
Start your festival day with free coffee and treats, book and tote bag giveaways, and a short reading by poet Jonah Mixon-Webster.
Prize-winning theater artist Sharon Bridgforth will pull cards from her dat Black Mermaid Man Lady Oracle Deck and dem Blessings Deck. Based on the cards, she and moderator Shamain McAllister will offer questions and conversation for our journey. You are invited to engage, connect, celebrate, and be witnessed. “I always ask, what does Infinite Love want us to Know?”
Aleshea Harris’s plays, according to Vinson Cunningham, make theater new by “reaching back to its old, mysterious, ceremonial roots.” Aleshea talks about the ceremony of theater with 2013 Windham-Campbell Prize recipient Tarell Alvin McCraney.
Sharon Bridgforth talks with Beinecke curator Melissa Barton about their mutual love of Langston Hughes, sharing reactions to selections from Hughes’s papers at Beinecke.
Zaffar Kunial reads from his new book of poems England’s Green and discusses the genesis of the book with Sunil Amrith, Renu and Anand Dhawan Professor of History, and current chair of the South Asian Studies Council. Free copies to the first fifty guests! Signing to follow.
A collaboration between Portuguese vocalist-composer Sara Serpa and Nigerian writer Emmanuel Iduma, drawing inspiration from Iduma’s book, A Stranger’s Pose, a unique blend of travelogue, musings and poetry. In a combination of music, text, image, and field recordings collected by Iduma during his travels, Intimate Strangers explores such themes as of movement, home, grief, absence, and desire in what Iduma calls “an atlas of a borderless world.”
