Reading Groups

A Year of Toni Morrison: Volume I with Maia Butler

4 sessions Tuesdays, 6:00 pm EDT - 7:30 pm EDT October 7, 2025 to January 6, 2026

Online via Zoom

$180 Without Books / $240 With Books

The ‘With Books’ option includes the titles required for this group at an additional 10% discount from our Bookstore.

This is the first of three installments in a yearlong exploration of Toni Morrison’s work. Email Zenzelé ([email protected]) to join the waitlist or be notified when registration opens for upcoming installments.

Meeting Dates:
10/7, 11/4, 12/2, 1/6
Online via Zoom

In our current moment, thoughtful discussions about identity, history, and justice urgently demand our attention. Our capacity to witness is crucial to our capacity to enact change. Toni Morrison’s fiction offers us powerful pathways toward new understandings of ourselves and our communities. Her novels sustain an unflinching eye on the quotidian facets of Black lives, revising notions of what we come to expect from a “hero’s journey,” offering windows into the rich interiority of Black women’s experiences, and countering traditional narratives of history, home, and nation.

Through lively discussions, we’ll explore the ways these works trouble the idea of the nation as home and redraw the boundaries of identity and belonging. Her body of work invites us to contend with representations of race and its many intersections with other facets of identity, to challenge our conceptions of foreignness and estrangement through depictions of outcasts and interlopers, and to reexamine the ways we know ourselves and each other in the ‘racial house’ of our national imagination.

Whether you’re a first-time reader or looking forward to new ways into the rich worlds Morrison has crafted, together we will encounter opportunities to be challenged and inspired. With her characters, we’ll move across various natural landscapes and built environments, through the memories and knowledge shaping their ways of being, and stretch our capacities to draw from and hold the wisdom of their freedom dreams. We will consider such important questions as: How do we reconcile our shared past with our ever-shifting present? What are the possibilities and limitations of love? How do we sustain community in a world of human-made disruptions?

Note: This is the first group of a planned year of reading Morrison’s oeuvre of fiction, engaging with eleven complex, moving novels. Each installment will cover a different set of books; readers are welcome and encouraged to sign up for subsequent installments when they are announced. Morrison’s Nobel Prize winning wor(l)ds will remind us that devotion to witnessing, inquiry, and engaging critical questions of today will inform our work building more just worlds for tomorrow.

What to read in advance of the first meeting: The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison

What to expect from this reading group: Each of these texts is a challenging and rewarding read, so I’ll be bringing questions to get us going, and participants should feel welcome to do the same. I hope participants will enjoy organic exchange, as our meaning-making becomes richer when all participants bring what they know into the circle. I look forward to sharing important concepts in literary studies that will shift the way you encounter, engage with, and understand the work of Toni Morrison and the broader impact of her work on Black women writers and Black literary culture.

Reading List:

Reading Resources for each text will also include: literary concepts and contexts, engaging multimedia contextual connections, thinking/discussion prompts, and suggestions for further reading and artistic engagement.

Please note: All virtual classes are recorded. Please click here for information about our recording policy.

Led by

Maia L. Butler

Maia L. Butler

Maia L. Butler (she/her/s) is Associate Professor of African American Literature at UNC Wilmington. She is a literary geographer centering Black women writers within African Diasporic and Anglophone Postcolonial studies. She co-founded the Edwidge Danticat Society, co-edited the award-winning collection Narrating History, Home, and Dyaspora: Critical Essays on Edwidge Danticat (University Press of Mississippi, 2022) and the collection bell hooks’s Radical Pedagogy: New Visions of Feminism, Justice, Love, and Resistance in the Classroom (Bloomsbury, 2025), and is at work on her first monograph Floating Homelands: Postnational Constructions of Home by Black Women and Nonbinary Writers, which has been supported by a Mellon fellowship in Democracy and Landscape Studies, hosted by Dumbarton Oaks, a Harvard trustee.

About this series

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