Windham-Campbell Festival: Prize Recipient Readings
Our annual closing event returns, featuring short readings by the 2022 prize recipients.
Our annual closing event returns, featuring short readings by the 2022 prize recipients.
“Skokiaan” is a popular tune originally written by Zimbabwean musician August Musarurwa that has been covered by many musician, including Louis Armstrong. Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu chats with Regina Bain, Executive Director of the Louis Armstrong House Museum, about the song and about Armstrong’s tours through the African Continent in the 50s and 60s.
Emmanuel Iduma discusses his weekly Substack newsletter Tender Photo, which focuses on African photography, with Professor of English Cajetan Iheka.
In addition to her novels, Tsitsi Dangarembga has also written, directed, and produced a number of films. In My Father’s Village is a powerful short film about the inheritance of trauma that she produced in 2017. Tsitsi will introduce the film, discuss its creation with Professor of History and African Studies Dan Magaziner, and answer questions from the audience.
Ishion Hutchinson will play a mash up of Jamaican music—ska, rocksteady, reggae and especially 1970s dub. Cooking up a dancing elixir, other genres will also be played. The session will be interspersed with performance of original dub poetry and a screening of a short film. Guest DJ appearance by Jonah Mixon-Webster.
Iconic local restaurant Sandra’s Next Generation will also be serving up a soul food feast!
Niel Gray Jr. Professor of English Langdon Hammer talks with poet Zaffar Kunial about the sources of his poetry, from song lyrics to family histories to his undying love for the sport of English cricket.
From the Windrush Generation in the United Kingdom to the Great Migration in the United States, the story of migration and its effect on families and culture was as significant a story in the last century as it is in this one. Alicia Schmidt Camacho engages four “children” of migrations about how this story has impacted their lives and their work.
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.