September 27, 2024
We are proud to have celebrated 100 years of James Baldwin at the 2024 Brooklyn Book Festival with a conversation between five exciting, contemporary writers: Regina Porter (The Rich People Have Gone Away), Honorée Fanonne Jeffers (The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois), Kim Coleman Foote (Coleman Hill), Shayla Lawz (speculation, n.), and Francesca Momplaisir (My Mother’s House), who will moderate the conversation.
Discovering the work of James Baldwin is an experience every reader remembers. His prose electrifies the mind and opens the heart in ways that feel at once revolutionary and eternally true. This event explores the work of this visionary writer through the women in novels. Each panelist will read from a different Baldwin novel and consider how his depictions of womanhood add layers to the text and enable readers to understand Baldwin’s literature–and legacy–in fresher, deeper ways.
THIS IS AN OFFICIAL 2024 BROOKLYN BOOK FESTIVAL BOOKEND EVENT.
In Conversation
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Regina Porter
Regina Porter
Regina Porter is an award-winning playwright and author of <a href=”https://bookstore.centerforfiction.org/item/3bfSPEKfdTchnllJpa7LlA”><em>The Travelers</em></a>, a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel and longlisted for the Orwell Political Fiction Prize. A graduate of the MFA fiction program at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, her writing has been published in the <em>Harvard Review</em>, <em>Tin House</em>, and the <em>Oxford American</em>.
Photo Credit: Jesse Dittmar
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Honorée Fanonne Jeffers
Honorée Fanonne Jeffers
Honorée Fanonne Jeffers is the author of the New York Times bestseller and Oprah Book Club Pick, The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction, and five poetry collections, including the NAACP Image Award-winning The Age of Phillis. She teaches at the University of Oklahoma, where she holds the Paul and Carol Daube Sutton Chair in English.
Photo Credit: Sydney A. Foster
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Kim Coleman Foote
Kim Coleman Foote
Kim Coleman Foote is the author of the debut novel Coleman Hill, named a finalist for the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction, NAACP Image Award, and Audie Award, and long-listed for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. Born and raised in New Jersey, Kim has received fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center at Provincetown, the NEA, NYFA, Bread Loaf, Phillips Exeter Academy, Center for Fiction, and Fulbright, and residencies at Yaddo, MacDowell, and Hedgebrook, among others. Her fiction and essays have appeared in The Best American Short Stories 2022, The Rumpus, Prairie Schooner, Kweli, and elsewhere.
Photo Credit: Sara Abbaspour
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Shayla Lawz
Shayla Lawz
Shayla Lawz is a writer and interdisciplinary artist working at the intersection of text, sound, and performance. She has received fellowships from Cave Canem, Jack Jones Literary Arts, The Digital Studies Center at Rutgers-Camden, and The Center for African American Poetry and Poetics (CAAPP) where she was the 2024 Dream Space Resident. She has served as the inaugural writer-in-residence at The Hurston/Wright Foundation and has been a visiting writer at The University of Arizona Poetry Center, Rutgers University, and Brown University where she received her MFA in fiction. Her writing and digital/sound work appear in McSweeney’s Quarterly, The Poetry Foundation, Catapult, and Obsidian, among other publications. Her debut poetry collection speculation, n. (2021) was chosen by Ilya Kaminsky for the 2020 Autumn House Poetry Prize and has been featured in Poets & Writers, the Slowdown, and NPR’s On the Record. She lives in Brooklyn where she is an Assistant Professor of Humanities and Media Studies at Pratt Institute.
Photo Credit: Elena Mudd
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Francesca Momplaisir
Francesca Momplaisir
Francesca Momplaisir is the author of The Garden of Broken Things and My Mother’s House. Born in Haiti, she is a multi-lingual scholar and novelist writing in English and Kreyol. Dr. Momplaisir studied at Columbia University, the University of Oxford, and New York University where she earned a doctorate in African and African diaspora literature. She is the recipient of a Fulbright fellowship to travel to Ghana to research the cultural retention of the transatlantic slave trade. Her debut novel was compared to Toni Morrison “at the height of her career” (Harper’s Bazaar) and made several best book lists including Elle and Vulture. She lives in the New York City metro area.
