The City College Black Studies Program presents,
Pepperpot and Poetry with KWAME DAWES
Part of The Chinua Achebe Legacy Series
20 April 2016
6pm-8pm
(reception at 5pm)
The School of Architecture
Room 107
City College
(corner of 135th and Convent)
Above adapted from emailed announcement.
Tuesday, 12 April
2:30 to 8:00pm
Martin E. Segal Theatre
CUNY Graduate Center
This symposium explores the historical relationship of the Dominican Republic and Haiti and their diasporas, with a particular emphasis on migration, race, and the visual arts. Composed of visual artists, community members, performers, and scholars, the event addresses the past and present relationship of Haiti and the Dominican Republic from an anthropological, literary, and art historical perspective. Scholars and artists will explore the revision of Hispañola’s flawed historical narrative, which constructed Euro-Centric racial hierarchies in the early 20th century in the Dominican Republic.
The symposium will be composed of two panels, an art performance, and a discussion about the performance. The symposium will be followed by a reception in the Art History lounge.
Speakers include:
Full program & registration details available here.
The symposium is convened by Abigail Lapin, Ph.D. Candidate in Art History, CUNY Graduate Center.
Cosponsored by the Institute for Research on the African Diaspora in the Americas and the Caribbean (IRADAC); Advanced Research Collaborative (ARC); the Doctoral Students’ Council; Dominican Studies Group, The Graduate Center, CUNY; Postcolonial Studies Group, The Graduate Center, CUNY; Feminist Studies Group, The Graduate Center, CUNY; and the PhD Program in Art History.
Above adapted from email announcement.
Image credit: Scherezade Garcia, Paisaje Compartido (Shared Landscape), 2012
A Colloquium organized by The Henri Peyre French Institute with the support of Fondasyon Konesans Ak Libète (FOKAL)
17 March 2016
City College Center for Worker Education
25 Broadway, 7th Floor
NY, NYC 10004
AND
18 March 2016
The Segal Theatre at The Graduate Center, CUNY
365 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10016 USA
Keynote Speakers: Etienne Tassin (Université Paris-Diderot) and William O’Neill (CPPF – Social Science Research Council)
All Events Free and Open to the Public (though Government-issued IDs required for building entrance)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Colloquium Program Continue reading Impunity, Responsibility and Citizenship – HAITI
Two programs and an exhibition in the NYC area will be honoring Caribbean women and culture. Full details on each event follow the short descriptions below.
PICTURE THIS EXHIBITION
3 -31 March 2016
St. Francis College – Callahan Center, 182 Remsen Street, Brooklyn, NY 11201
WOMEN WRITING THE CARIBBEAN
Wednesday, 16 March 2016
6:00 – 8:30pm
160 Convent Ave – Shepard Hall Room 250, New York, NY 10031
WOMAN TINGS: A CARIBBEAN LITERARY (AND ARTS) LIME
Sunday, 20 MARCH 2016
4:00 – 8:00pm
St. Francis College, 182 Remsen street, Brooklyn, NY 11217
____________________________________________
Details
PICTURE THIS EXHIBITION
A group exhibition celebrating the creative duality of Writers as Visual Artists
3 -31 March 2016
St. Francis College – Callahan Center, 182 Remsen Street, Brooklyn, NY 11201
Featured Artists
Curators: Loris Crawford, Savacou Gallery, and Ava Tomlinson
***
WOMEN WRITING THE CARIBBEAN
Wednesday, 16 March 2016
6:00 – 8:30pm
160 Convent Ave – Shepard Hall Room 250, New York, NY 10031
A panel discussion of women Caribbean writers. Featured writers:
Register to attend here.
***
WOMAN TINGS: A CARIBBEAN LITERARY (AND ARTS) LIME
Sunday, 20 MARCH 2016
St. Francis College, 182 Remsen street, Brooklyn, NY 11217
4:30PM – Domestic Workers as Art and Literature
With novelists Victoria Brown (Minding Ben) and Nandi Keyi (The True Nanny Dairy) with painter Laura James.
Hosted by Stephanie A. Cunningham, Brooklyn Museum
6:00PM – Women Colouring Words
The fascinating, multiple influences on the work of poets and painters Jacqueline Bishop (The Gymnast and Other Positions), Michele Voltaire Marcelin (Amours et Bagatelles), and Opal Palmer-Adisa (I Name Me Name).
Hosted by Daniela Fifi, National Museum & Art Gallery
7:00pm: In Her Own Words
Open Mic session hosted by poet and painter, Iyaba Ibo Mandingo (“Sins of My Fathers”), and spoken word artist, Mercy L. Tullis-Bukhari (SMOKE)
ADM: $10
INFO: 718-783-8345 / [email protected]
The Museum of Art and Design (NYC) presents a series of events in conjunction with the Jamaican Sound System program and the Ebony G. Patterson: Dead Treez exhibition.
The remaining events (as of this posting) are listed below. All events take place at:
The Museum of Arts and Design
Jerome And Simona Chazen Building / 2 Columbus Circle / New York, NY 10019
(212) 299-7777
The Harder They Come (film)
Friday, 4 March 2016
7:00 pm
Rockers (film)
Friday, 11 March 2016
7:00 pm
Socially Constructed: A Guided Hands-on Workshop Inspired by Ebony G. Patterson
Thursday, 17 March 2016
6:30 pm
Dancehall Queen (film)
Friday, 18 March 2016
7:00 pm
Krista Thompson on ‘Shine’ (book talk)
Thursday, 24 March 2016
7:00 pm
More details on the Jamaican Sound System program may be found here. More details on the Ebony G. Patterson: Dead Treez exhibition, which runs 10 November 2015 to 3 April 2016 may be found here.
A lecture by David Scott, Columbia University
26 February 2016
1:30 PM
Alexander Library Teleconference Lecture Hall
College Avenue Campus
Rutgers, New Brunswick
The Rutgers Advanced Institute for Critical Caribbean Studies presents the inaugural Sylvia Wynter Distinguished Lecture in Critical Caribbean Studies.
Hew Locke’s first solo exhibition in New York
24 February – 1 April 2016
Edward Tyler Nahem Fine Art
37 West 57th Street, 2nd floor, New York, NY 10019
Ph 212 517 2433
[email protected]
Hours: Monday-Friday 10am-5:30pm.
Edward Tyler Nahem is pleased to present Hew Locke’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. The Anglo-Guyanese artist who lives in Great Britain and spent his formative years in Guyana, consistently explores themes of race, colonialism, displacement, the creation of cultures, and the visual codes of power, drawing on a deeply personal visual language.
Hew Locke: The Wine Dark Sea will present new works by the artist that highlight Locke’s acclaimed sculptures of boats, which occupy an important place in his personal iconography. ‘The wine dark sea’ is a description of the Mediterranean used by Homer throughout The Odyssey, and the phrase is repeated by Derek Walcott in his epic poem Omeros set mainly in the Caribbean, and referencing characters from The Iliad. Locke’s visual poem likewise points up the universality of many of our experiences.
This new series of twenty-five vessels of varied scale and hues will be suspended from the ceiling, creating a flotilla at eye level. Incorporating contemporary and historically resonant vessels – clippers and container ships, battleships and lifeboats – Locke will create a spectacular sculptural environment. Locke’s work articulates this environment as filled with hope, potential prosperity and gratification, as well as despair, anguish, and suffering. This narrative resonates deeply with the tides of refugees fleeing to the sea from war, oppression, and poverty, but also with those viewers for whom migration and displacement are part of family history. A ship is a symbolic object; vessel of the soul, means of escape, both safety and danger. According to Locke, “We’re all floating on the same ocean. As a child and young man I sailed the Atlantic. At sea, a twist of fate can send a super-yacht down – it can be an equalizer between rich and poor.”
Locke’s multi-media practice includes large-format installation, painting, sculpture, photography and tapestry and has been called a “’mental Moulinex,’ or food processor, into which experiences are tossed, mixed around, and transformed into chimerical creations.” (ArtNews, April 2014). Related works include his celebrated For Those in Peril on the Sea, 2011, in the collection of the Peréz Art Museum Miami and The Tourists, 2014, an installation commissioned by the Imperial War Museum for the museum ship HMS Belfast, London.
Born in Scotland, Locke grew up in Georgetown, Guyana before returning to Britain for his university education. His work has been exhibited around the globe, most recently at Tate Britain, and in Runnymede, UK where he was commissioned to make a permanent memorial to celebrate the 800th anniversary of the signing of the Magna Carta. Locke’s work is represented in the collections of Tate Gallery (UK), the Brooklyn Museum (New York), the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art (US), Kansas City Collection (US), the RISD Museum (Rhode Island), Victoria & Albert Museum (London), and the British Museum (London) amongst others.
Image above – The Wine Dark Sea, (boat BB), 2016, mixed media with custom hand embroidery, 76 x 33 x 98cm
Above adapted from press release and email announcement.
Ada Ferrer Book Talk
3 February 2016
2:30pm
Rutgers University-Newark
Dana Room
4th Floor of the Dana Library
185 University Avenue, Newark, NJ
Historian Ada Ferrer is a Professor of History and Latin American and Caribbean Studies at New York University. In her talk, Professor Ferrer will read from her most recent book, Freedom’s Mirror: Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 2014). In 2015, this title received the Frederick Douglass Book Prize, as well as three awards from the American Historical Association: the Friedrich Katz Prize, the Wesley-Logan Prize, and the James A. Rawley Prize.
This lecture is free and open to the public, and will be followed by a reception with light refreshments.
The event is sponsored by the Department of Spanish & Portuguese Studies, Rutgers University-Newark.
Above adapted from announcement on the RU-Newark Department of Spanish & Portuguese Studies event page.
 Renée Cox, River Queen, (from the Queen Nanny of the Maroons series),
Digital inkjet print on watercolor paper, 42 x 42, (2004). |
The images presented in this series reveal Cox’s obsession with self-fashioning and the significance and power of the female gaze in the context of the post-colonial and the still-prevailing Enlightenment notions of what constitutes Western womanhood. At once self-possessed, forceful, and illusive, these photographs interrupt the authority of the camera and challenges the viewer to consider practices of seeing and consumption as Cox restages the community and life of this singular figure now heralded as a national hero.
Renee Cox was born in 1960 in Colgate, Jamaica. She lives and works in New York. She has received an award from the New York Foundation for the Arts as well as an Aaron Matalon award at the National Gallery of Jamaica. She was also chosen to participate at the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Studies Program (1992–1993) and had several gallery and museum exhibitions, including the Museum of Modern Art (1993), Whitney Museum of American Art (1993), the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston (1995), Alrdich Museum (1996), New Museum (1999), Venice Biennial, Smithsonian Accostia Museum and Center for African American History and Culture (2000), Brooklyn Museum (2001) and Studio Harlem Museum (2005 and 2012).
New Haven, CT 06515
Sponsored by the Black Pulp! exhibition and Yale University’s Initiative for Race, Gender and Globalization and its director Professor Hazel Carby (AfAm Studies), Renee Cox will give an All School Lecture in the School of Art on her journey as an artist, photographer and woman.
Renee is also the focus of a current Columbia University exhibition, Renee Cox: Revisiting the Queen Nanny Series (22 January – 14 April 2016) by Curator Rich Blint. The show offers selected photographs from the artist’s “Queen Nanny Series” from 2004 in which the artist personifies the 17th-18th century black woman.
Renee Cox was born in 1960 in Colgate, Jamaica. She lives and works in New York. She has received an award from the New York Foundation for the Arts as well as an Aaron Matalon award at the National Gallery of Jamaica. She was also chosen to participate at the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Studies Program (1992–1993) and had several gallery and museum exhibitions, including the Museum of Modern Art (1993), Whitney Museum of American Art (1993), the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston (1995), Alrdich Museum (1996), New Museum (1999), Venice Biennial, Smithsonian Accostia Museum and Center for African American History and Culture (2000), Brooklyn Museum (2001) and Studio Harlem Museum (2005 and 2012).
Above adapted from the Yale University Initiative on Race, Gender and Globalization event page.
Nijah Noel Cunningham
Assistant Professor, Hunter College
presents work at the CUNY Africana Forum
November 5, 2015, 4:15 PM
Room C205
Graduate Center
365 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10016
Livestream: http://videostreaming.gc.cuny.edu/videos/
A Haunting Refrain: Time, Aesthetics, and the Afterlives of Black Radicalism
What happened to the future possibilities that once animated the longings for black and anticolonial revolution? How do we think about futurity in the context of freedom’s nonarrival? What form do utopian aspirations take when political possibilities appear exhausted? Living in the aftermath of revolutionary times, how might we remember what could have been? Working at the convergence of literature, performance theory, and visual culture, this paper considers the “afterlives” of black radical politics by way of an engagement with For Malcolm: Poems on the Life and Death of Malcolm, a collection of poems compiled and edited by Dudley Randall and Margaret Burroughs following the assassination of Malcolm X in 1965, and a photograph of Betty Shabazz and two of her daughters at the 1967 Black Arts Convention in Detroit. This paper interrogates the normative logic of reproductive futurity that frames the legacy of Malcolm X and structures the redemptive accounts of a black nation to-come narrated in the wake of his death. Rather than reproduce masculinist imaginaries of black revolution or recuperate promises of political redemption, this paper mobilizes the work of elegy and photography to open up nascent worldings that linger in the present like a “haunting refrain.”
Presented by IRADAC, the CUNY Africana Forum invites CUNY faculty to freely engage with scholars and laypersons on issues concerning the African Diaspora worldwide.
Refreshments will be served.
Save the date
(full site with more information to come)
4 December 2015
Barnard College/Columbia University
Preliminary Program
1-2:30PM Panel I – Histories
Vincent Brown, Harvard University – Two Plantations: Enslaved Families in Virginia & Jamaica
Laurent Dubois & Mary Caton Lingold, Duke University – Musical Passage: A Voyage to 1688 Jamaica
Jennifer Morgan, New York University – Discussant
2:30-2:45PM BREAK
2:45-3:45PM Panel II – Cartographies
Kaiama L. Glover, Barnard College & Alex Gil, Columbia University –
In the Same Boats: Toward an Afro-Atlantic Intellectual Cartography
Ian Baucom, University of Virginia – Discussant
3:45-4PM BREAK
4-5:30PM Panel III – Narratives
Robert Antoni – As Flies to Whatless Boys
Oonya Kempadoo – Naniki
Kelly Baker Josephs, York College, CUNY – Discussant
5:30-6:30PM RECEPTION
A Small Axe Project event
Co-sponsored by: The Africana Studies Department, Barnard College; The Columbia University Center for the Study of Social Difference; The Maison Française, Columbia University; The Columbia University Greater Caribbean Center; The Barnard Forum on Migration, Institute for Research in African-American Studies, Columbia University.
Thursday, 24 September – Saturday, 25 September 2015
Diana Center Event Oval, Barnard College & SUNY Stony Brook, Manhattan Campus
Described by Henry Louis Gates as ‘Black Britain’s leading theorist of Black Britain,’ Stuart Hall was the preeminent post-colonial intellectual of Great Britain from the 1960s until his death in 2014. One of the founders of ‘cultural studies,’ Hall’s influence extended across the intellectual spectrum of the Left, rocking political and academic worlds with his theorizations of race, ethnicity, feminism, nationality, and politics, shaping their discourse for the rest of the twentieth century into the twenty-first. Using Hall’s key essays and books as touchstones, the conference will examine how his ideas can help us to think through some of the most urgent problems of the contemporary moment. With ongoing crises of authority caused by police violence, mass and racialized incarceration across the United States, as well as concerns around economic, environmental, social and religious justice across the world, Hall’s bold and prescient theorizations of neoliberalism and its operations remain intensely relevant.
Conference Program
Thursday, 24 September
Diana Center, Barnard College, 3009 Broadway
5:00 PM – 6:30 PM
Roundtable: Reconstructing the Popular
Chair, E. Ann Kaplan (Stony Brook University)
Susan Willis (Duke University)
Rob King (Columbia University)
Bruce Robbins (Columbia University)
Jane Gaines (Columbia University)
6:30 PM – 7:30 PM
Reception
***
Friday, 25 September
The Humanities Institute at Stony Brook (HISB)
Stony Brook University Manhattan Campus, 387 Park Ave South
8:30 AM – 9:00 AM
Coffee
9:00 AM – 10:30 AM
Introduction and Keynote
Keynote by David Scott (Columbia University)
Introduced by Tina Campt (Barnard College)
10:30 AM – 10:45 AM
Break
10:45 AM – 12:30 PM
History of the Present: Race, Nation, Empire
Chair, Kathleen Wilson (Stony Brook University)
Antoinette Burton (University of Illinois)
Bill Schwarz (Queen Mary University of London)
Geoff Eley (University of Michigan)
12:30 PM – 2:00 PM
Lunch
2:00 PM – 3:45 PM
Where is the Black?: Revisiting the Black Popular Culture Conference (1991)
Chair, Jane Gaines (Columbia University)
Kellie Jones (Columbia University)
Racquel Gates (CUNY, Staten Island)
Gina Dent (University of California Santa Cruz)
3:45 – 4:00 PM
Coffee Break
4:00 PM – 5:45 PM
Practice of Critique: Race, Gender, Sexuality
Chair, Tina Campt (Barnard College)
Terri Francis (Indiana University)
Rinaldo Walcott ( University of Toronto)
Jacqueline N. Brown (CUNY, Hunter College)
***
Saturday, 26 September
Event Oval, Diana Center, Barnard College, 3009 Broadway
9:00 AM – 9:30 AM
Coffee
9:30 AM – 11:15 AM
New Media: Encoding, Decoding, Coding
Chair, Rob King (Columbia University)
Henry Jenkins (University of Southern California)
David Morley (Goldsmith’s College, University of London)
Nicholas Mirzoeff (Culture, and Communications, NYU)
11:15 AM – 11:30 AM
Coffee Break
11:30 AM – 1:30 PM
Policing the Crises: Thinking It Forward
Chair, Tina Campt (Barnard College)
Barnor Hesse (Northwestern University)
Ben Carrington (University of Texas, Austin)
Karla Holloway (Duke University)
Venues are accessible to people with mobility disabilities.
This event is free and open to the public. Preregistration is strongly encouraged.
Register here.
Above adapted from emailed announcement.
Below are a list of events with Caribbean-identified authors before and during the Brooklyn Book Festival. The list may be incomplete. All events free unless otherwise noted.
BOOKEND EVENTS
The Word Is Fresh: Bocas presents new Caribbean poets
Thurs, 17 September, 7:00pm
Old Stone House 336 3rd St., Brooklyn, NY 11215
An inspiring line up of new (and newish) Caribbean poets, including:
Hosted by Nicholas Laughlin, poet and NGC Bocas Lit Fest programme director.
More info here.
**************
Picture This: Visual and Verbal (Re)Imagining of the Contemporary Caribbean
Fri, 18 September. 7:00pm
South Oxford Space, 138 South Oxford St., Brooklyn, NY 11217
$10
An evening of reading and conversations on imagining the contemporary Caribbean in fiction, poetry and photography. The evening features a medley of writers bringing the literary heart and art of Antigua & Barbuda, Jamaica and Trinidad & Tobago: fiction writers Tanya Batson Savage (Pumpkin Belly and Other Stories), Kellie Magnus (Little Lion), and Nandi Keyi-Ogunlade (True Nanny Diaries); urban poets Owen Blakka Ellis (Riddim & Riddles) and Iyaba Ibo Mandingo (41 Times, Amerikkkan Exile, and 40 days n 40 nights of write). Latoya West-Blackwood will journey through the visual imaginings with the book My Jamaica. A book bashment follows.
More info here.
**************
Haiti Cultural Exchange presents:
Café Conversations with Gina Athena Ulysse, author of Why Haiti Needs New Narratives: A Post-Quake Chronicle
Saturday, 19 September, 1:00pm
Dweck Center, Brooklyn Public Library, 10 Grand Army Plaza, Brooklyn, NY, 11238
Free (Suggestion Donation $10)
Mainstream news coverage of the catastrophic earthquake of 2010 reproduced longstanding narratives and stereotypes of Haiti. Cognizant that this Haiti, as it exists in the public sphere, is a rhetorically and graphically incarcerated one, the feminist anthropology professor at Wesleyan and performance artist Gina Athena Ulysse embarked on a writing spree that lasted over two years. As an ethnographer and a member of the diaspora, Ulysse delivers critical cultural analysis of geopolitics and daily life in a series of dispatches, op-eds and articles on post-quake Haiti.
More info here.
**************
Women’s Voices and Caribbean Literature
Saturday, 19 September, 2:00pm
MoCADA 80 Hanson Place, Brooklyn, NY, 11217
General Donation: $10.00. Students: $5.00.
The Center for Black Literature at Medgar Evers College presents a literary salon with Naomi Jackson (The Star Side of Bird Hill) in conversation with Rosalind Kilkenny McLymont (The Guyana Contract). Presented in collaboration with Penguin Press and The Network Journal.
This event is a fundraiser for the Center for Black Literature.
More info here.
FESTIVAL EVENTS – Sunday, 20 September
Finalists of the St. Francis College Literary Prize
St. Francis College Auditorium, 180 Remsen St
10:00am
St. Francis College Presents Finalists of the St. Francis College Literary Prize. Maud Casey (The Man Who Walked Away), David Gilbert (& Sons), Rene Steinke (Friendswood), Marlon James (A Brief History of Seven Killings)and Paul Beatty (The Sellout) and more. Moderated by Daniel Torday.
More info here.
**************
Why Fiction Matters
Brooklyn Historical Society Library, 128 Pierrepont St
12:00pm
This discussion of the importance of fiction in contemporary life kicks off a series of essays commissioned by The Center for Fiction to celebrate its upcoming move to the BAM Cultural District. With Alexander Chee, Mitchell Jackson, Roxana Robinson, and Tiphanie Yanique. Moderated by Noreen Tomassi, Center for Fiction.
More info here.
**************
Today’s Yesterday
Borough Hall Courtroom, 209 Joralemon St
12:00pm
Master storytellers Michael Datcher (Americus) and Esmeralda Santiago (Conquistadora) discuss their compelling and tragic historical fictions. Set in the turbulent eras of the U.S. and Puerto Rico, their stories ring familiar with passions that change lives and cultural brutalities that define racism and classism running as rampant in the past as today. With twin brothers in both stories, there is twice as much havoc in families caught up in their lives and loves. Moderated by Theo Gangi, St. Francis College.
More info here.
**************
Confronting Tomorrow
Brooklyn Historical Society Library, 128 Pierrepont St
1:00pm
At the intersection of youth and adulthood, three young protagonists and their friends and families confront realities that change their lives. Joanne Hillhouse (Musical Youth) Tanwi Nandini Islam (Bright Lines), and Matthew McGevna (Little Beasts) deal with actions that change one and cannot be changed. Short readings and discussion. Moderated by Ian Maloney, St. Francis College.
More info here.
**************
The Search for the Discussible Book
St. Francis College Workshop Room, 180 Remsen St
1:00pm
Reading Group Choices (RGC) will provide tips on how to start and maintain a reading group, and how to choose discussible books. Attendees will receive copies of RGC¹s 2016 edition. Following the discussion, authors featured with Reading Group Choices will tell you abouttheir books through a few fun rounds of author-speed-dating! The participating authors are: Naomi Jackson (The Other Side of Bird Hill), Akhil Sharma (Family Life), Maggie Thrash (Honor Girl), and Rebecca Dinerstein (The Sunlit Night).
More info here.
**************
Time Traveling
Borough Hall Courtroom, 209 Joralemon St
2:00pm
Three writers discuss what riveted them to the time and location of their most recent novels and how the past speaks to the present. Jami Attenberg’s Saint Mazie is set in early-20th-century New York; Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings takes place in Jamaica in the 1970s, and Stewart O’Nan’s West of Sunset follows F. Scott Fitzgerald to Hollywood in the 1930s. Moderated by Nicholas Laughlin, Bocas Lit Fest.
More info here.
**************
Triple Crown
St. Ann & The Holy Trinity Church, 157 Montague St
2:00pm
Join three prolific literary powerhouses as they read from their recent work: Esmeralda Santiago (Conquistadora), National Book Award Winner and New York Times bestselling author Joyce Carol Oates (The Lost Landscape), and Pulitzer Prize finalist Russell Banks (A Permanent Member of the Family). Q & A moderated by New York Times Book Review editor Greg Cowles.
More info here.
**************
Between Two Worlds
Borough Hall Media Room, 209 Joralemon St
3:00pm
Naomi Jackson (The Star Side of Bird Hill), Yitzhak Gormezano Goren (Alexandrian Summer), and Juan Villoro (The Guilty: Stories) present the push and pull of navigating between worlds – sisters sent from Brooklyn to live in Barbados; the Egyptian upper middle class fleeing Alexandria for Israel; and contemporary Mexicans and Americans overlapping cultures and preconceptions. Geography, history and a search for authenticity create an interplay of desire and rejection and sometimes humor about a place and time. Moderated by Malaika Adero.
More info here.
**************
Best of Brooklyn
St. Ann & The Holy Trinity Church, 157 Montague St
3:30pm
The Brooklyn Book Festival pays homage to the Festival’s literary heritage each year by presenting the BoBi Award to an author who exemplifies the spirit and character of Brooklyn. Join 2015 BoBi Honoree Jonathan Lethem (Lucky Alan: And Other Stories), in conversation with past BoBi honorees Edwidge Danticat (Claire of the Sea Light) and Pete Hamill (Snow in August) as they talk about a writer’s life and being part of, and influenced by, Brooklyn’s literary lineage. Moderated by Johnny Temple, Brooklyn Literary Council Chair.
More info here.
**************
Scams and Swindles: Hustling to Survive
Borough Hall Media Room, 209 Joralemon St
5:00pm
Fiston Mwanza Mujila (Tram 83), Pierre Lemaître (The Great Swindle) and Kettly Mars (Savage Seasons) variously explore the modern African gold rush, veterans in a post-WW 1 Europe, and Haiti’s dictatorship in the 1960s; what they have in common is a searing examination of the human costs of political upheaval. Join them for a conversation about the surprising skills their characters must develop in order to survive. Moderated by Tom Roberge, Albertine.
More info here.
**************
Lost and Found
Brooklyn Law School Student Lounge, 250 Joralemon St
5:00pm
Family, culture, violence and loss infuse a collection of poems by Colin Channer (Providential), Jennifer Pashley’s novel The Scamp, and a short-story collection by Russell Banks (A Permanent Member of the Family). Hitched to their past, characters struggle to find optimistic possibilities, or follow a trail of blood and self-destruction. Short readings and discussion. Moderated by Christopher John Farley (Game World, Wall Street Journal).
More info here.
Harlem Shadows – The Legacy of Claude McKay and Caribbean Verse
Tues, Sept 15 @ 6:00pm
Brooklyn Public Library Flatbush Branch
22 Linden Blvd (corner Flatbush Ave), Brooklyn, NY 11226
To celebrate poet Claude McKay’s 126th birthday, scholars Jacqueline Bishop (New York University) and Louis Parascandola, Ph.D. (Long Island University) and poet David Mills will lead a literary conversation on the Caribbean cultural presence during the early 20th Century.
Above adapted from Caribbean Cultural Theater email announcement.
