The Black Flamingo
by Dean Atta
Dean Atta joins from the UK to discuss his debut novel The Black Flamingo, awarded the 2020 Stonewall Book Award, and shortlisted for the CILIP Carnegie Medal, YA Book Prize and Jhalak Prize. Atta, named as one of the most influential LGBT people in the UK by the Independent on Sunday, is a writer who deals with themes of race, gender and sexuality.
Featuring: Dean Atta; moderator, Emil Wilbekin
Presented in partnership with Native Son
The Collected Poems of Sterling A. Brown
by Sterling A. Brown
Join us for an exploration of the poetry of Sterling A. Brown (1901–1989) and the republication of The Collected Poems of Sterling A. Brown edited by the late distinguished poet Michael S. Harper and a new foreword by award-winning poet Cornelius Eady. Brown was one of the most important and influential figures in the development of African American literature and criticism in the twentieth century.
Featuring: Cornelius Eady, poet, musican, and co-founder of Cave Canem; JoAnne McFarland, artist, poet, and curator; Brian Gilmore, poet, writer, and law professor
When They Call You A Terrorist (Young Adult Edition)
by Patrisse Cullors
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Patrisse Khan-Cullors' and asha bandele's instant New York Times bestseller, When They Call You a Terrorist is now adapted for the YA audience. From one of the co-founders of the Black Lives Matter movement comes a poetic memoir and reflection on humanity. Necessary and timely, Patrisse Khan-Cullors’ story asks us to remember that protest in the interest of the most vulnerable comes from love. Leaders of the Black Lives Matter movement have been called terrorists, a threat to America. But in truth, they are loving women whose life experiences have led them to seek justice for those victimized by the powerful.
Featuring: Patrisse Cullors; moderator, Kadiatou Tubman, Schomburg Center
Undercurrents of Power: Aquatic Culture in the African Diaspora
The Death of Vivek Oji
by Akwaeke Emezi
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One afternoon, in a town in southeastern Nigeria, a mother opens her front door to discover her son’s body, wrapped in colorful fabric, at her feet. What follows is the tumultuous, heart-wrenching story of one family’s struggle to understand a child whose spirit is both gentle and mysterious. Raised by a distant father and an understanding but overprotective mother, Vivek suffers disorienting blackouts, moments of disconnection between self and surroundings. As adolescence gives way to adulthood, Vivek finds solace in friendships with the warm, boisterous daughters of the Nigerwives, foreign-born women married to Nigerian men. But Vivek’s closest bond is with Osita, the worldly, high-spirited cousin whose teasing confidence masks a guarded private life. As their relationship deepens—and Osita struggles to understand Vivek’s escalating crisis—the mystery gives way to a heart-stopping act of violence in a moment of exhilarating freedom.
Featuring: Akwaeke Emezi; moderator, Eloghosa Osunde
Girl, Woman, Other
by Bernadine Evaristo
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British writer Bernardine Evaristo is the award-winning author of eight books and numerous other works. Roxane Gay, a prolific writer and voracious reader wrote in her year end summary of reading that Girl, Woman, Other by Evaristo was her favorite book of 2019. Evaristo’s novel won the 2019 Booker Prize making her the first Black woman to win the prestigious award.
Featuring: Bernardine Evaristo; moderator, Roxane Gay
Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration
by Nicole Fleetwood
Nicole Fleetwood and Elizabeth Hinton discuss Fleetwood’s book, Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration, about how the imprisoned turn ordinary objects into elaborate works of art. The book is based on interviews with currently and formerly incarcerated artists, prison visits, and the author’s own family experiences with the penal system.
Featuring: Nicole R. Fleetwood; moderator, Elizabeth Hinton
In partnership with NYPL, The Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers
A Tall History of Sugar
by Curdella Forbes
A Tall History of Sugar tells the story of Moshe Fisher, a man who was "born without skin," so that no one is able to tell what race he belongs to; and Arrienne Christie, his quixotic soul mate who makes it her duty in life to protect Moshe from the social and emotional consequences of his strange appearance. The narrative begins with Moshe's birth in the late 1950s, four years before Jamaica's independence from colonial rule, and ends in the era of what Forbes calls "the fall of empire," the era of Brexit and Donald Trump.
Featuring: Curdella Forbes; moderator, Dimitry Elias Léger
The Selected Works of Audre Lorde
by Roxane Gay
Join us for a conversation with three extraordinary writers—Roxane Gay, Mahogany L. Browne and Tracy K. Smith—as they discuss the clarion call of Audre Lorde's work in the context of today's political warfare and the recent republication of Sister Outsider and The Cancer Journals and a new publication The Selected Works of Audre Lorde.
Featuring: Roxane Gay, editor of The Selected Works of Audre Lorde; Tracy K. Smith, provided a new foreword to The Cancer Journals; Mahogany L. Browne, provided a new foreword to Sister Outsider; moderator, Salamishah Tillet
Begin Again: James Baldwin's America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own
by Eddie Glaude, Jr.
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In the story of Baldwin’s crucible, Glaude suggests, we can find hope and guidance through our own after times, this Trumpian era of shattered promises and white retrenchment. Mixing biography—drawn partially from newly uncovered interviews—with history, memoir, and trenchant analysis of our current moment, Begin Again is Glaude’s endeavor, following Baldwin, to bear witness to the difficult truth of race in America today. It is at once a searing exploration that lays bare the tangled web of race, trauma, and memory, and a powerful interrogation of what we all must ask of ourselves in order to call forth a new America.
Featuring: Eddie S. Glaude, Jr.; moderator, Dr. Brian Jones, Schomburg Center
Every Body Looking
by Candice Iloh
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Candice Iloh is a first generation Nigerian-American writer, teaching artist, and youth educator celebrating the debut of her novel Every Body Looking. Candice will read from her young adult, novel in verse and discuss her work with writer, organizer, and educator Mahogany L. Browne.
Featuring: Candice Iloh; moderator, Mahogany L. Browne
The Cancer Journals
by Audre Lorde
Join us for a conversation with three extraordinary writers—Roxane Gay, Mahogany L. Browne and Tracy K. Smith—as they discuss the clarion call of Audre Lorde's work in the context of today's political warfare and the recent republication of Sister Outsider and The Cancer Journals and a new publication The Selected Works of Audre Lorde.
Featuring: Roxane Gay, editor of The Selected Works of Audre Lorde; Tracy K. Smith, provided a new foreword to The Cancer Journals; Mahogany L. Browne, provided a new foreword to Sister Outsider; moderator, Salamishah Tillet
Sister Outsider
by Audre Lorde
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Join us for a conversation with three extraordinary writers—Roxane Gay, Mahogany L. Browne and Tracy K. Smith—as they discuss the clarion call of Audre Lorde's work in the context of today's political warfare and the recent republication of Sister Outsider and The Cancer Journals and a new publication The Selected Works of Audre Lorde.
Featuring: Roxane Gay, editor of The Selected Works of Audre Lorde; Tracy K. Smith, provided a new foreword to The Cancer Journals; Mahogany L. Browne, provided a new foreword to Sister Outsider; moderator, Salamishah Tillet
Coming Full Circle
by Wanda Smalls Lloyd
Wanda Smalls Lloyd’s Coming Full Circle: From Jim Crow to Journalism―with a foreword by best-selling author Tina McElroy Ansa―is the memoir of an African American woman who grew up privileged and educated in the restricted culture of the American South in the 1950s–1960s. Her path was shaped by segregated social, community, and educational systems, religious and home training, a strong cultural foundation, and early leadership opportunities. Despite Jim Crow laws that affected where she lived, how she was educated, and what civil rights she would be denied, Lloyd grew up to realize her childhood dream of working as a professional journalist. In fact, she would eventually hold some of the nation’s highest-ranking newspaper editorial positions and become one of the first African American women to be the top editor of a mainstream daily newspaper.
Featuring: Wanda Smalls Lloyd; moderator, Alexandria Neason
Sometimes I Never Suffered: Poems
by Shane McCrae
In Sometimes I Never Suffered, his seventh collection of poems, Shane McCrae remains “a shrewd composer of American stories” (Dan Chiasson, The New Yorker). Here, an angel, hastily thrown together by his fellow residents of Heaven, plummets to Earth in his first moments of consciousness. Jim Limber, the adopted mixed-race son of Jefferson Davis, wanders through the afterlife, reckoning with the nuances of America’s racial history, as well as his own.
Sometimes I Never Suffered is a search for purpose and atonement, freedom and forgiveness, imagining eternity not as an escape from the past or present, but as a reverberating record and as the culmination of time’s manifold potential to mend.
Featuring: Shane McCrae; moderator, Rio Cortez, Schomburg Center
Love from the Vortex & Other Poems
by Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz, Ph.D
Love from the Vortex & Other Poems (Kaleidoscope Vibrations, LLC), is poet and scholar-activist Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz’s first full-length collection. An archaeological exploration on love and intimacy, the book charts her journey of finding and losing love over the span of three decades with six different men who came into her life at various times, but also offers a universal take on what can happen when one seeks love and connection with others, and the lessons that follow when that connection and love is lost.
Featuring: Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz, Ph.D; moderator, Rio Cortez, Schomburg Center
Before the Ever After
by Jacqueline Woodson
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National Book Award winner Jacqueline Woodson has a celebrated career as a writer that spans 30 years. She won the 2020 Hans Christian Andersen Award, the highest international distinction given to authors and illustrators of children's books. As the award site notes, Woodson has a prolific body of writing from picture books to young adult literature, all of which feature lyrical language, powerful characters, and an abiding sense of hope. She has served as the National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature (2018-19) and as the Young People’s Poet Laureate (2015-17).
In 2019, Woodson released her second novel Red at the Bone, now available in paperback. On September 1, 2020 she published Before the Ever After. The stirring novel-in-verse explores how a family moves forward when their glory days have passed and the cost of professional sports on Black bodies.
Featuring: Jacqueline Woodson and invited guests
Explore the 2022 Schomburg Center Literary Festival
The Schomburg Center Literary Festival: Reading the African Diaspora expands the center's long tradition of championing authors of African descent from across the globe and publications that celebrate Black history and culture.
