Important Update: 92Y remains open
92Y brings together a group of the nation’s most celebrated Black scholars, critics and writers for a year-long series on all the novels of Toni Morrison—from The Bluest Eye (1975), which she wrote between her day job as a book editor and her life as a single mother; to God Help the Child, from which she read on our stage in 2015, the last of many 92Y appearances over the years.
Morrison was The Robert F. Goheen Professor in the Humanities, Emerita, at Princeton University, as well as the recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Foundation’s Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Obama. She was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993 for writing “novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import” that give “life to an essential aspect of American reality.”
Each scholar will deliver a 45-minute lecture on a novel and then answer questions posed via Zoom’s chat feature. To purchase Ms. Morrison’s books, please visit Bookshop.
February 25: The Bluest Eye with Yvette Christiansë March 25: Sula with Farah Jasmine Griffin April 29: Song of Solomon with Hilton Als May 27: Tar Baby with Carolyn Denard
Subsequent lectures will be announced in April 2021.
Programs taking place online:An access link will be emailed to you after purchase.
Programs taking place in our NYC facilities:Please read our safety guidelines before visiting our building.
Programs taking place online and in our NYC facilities:Please select which experience you wish to participate in when registering. Online participants will be emailed an access link after purchase. In-person participants should read our safety guidelines before attending the program.
Yvette Christiansë is Professor of Africana Studies and English Literature at Barnard College. She is the author of Toni Morrison: An Ethical Poetics …
Yvette Christiansë is Professor of Africana Studies and English Literature at Barnard College. She is the author of Toni Morrison: An Ethical Poetics. For some twenty-seven years, she has been researching the stall in a pursuit of complete European and American abolition of African slavery that resulted in almost a century of contest over the fates of Liberated Africans—those who were freed from the holds of slave vessels between 1807 and into the early years of the Twentieth Century. Her research has taken her to archives in the Indian and Atlantic Oceans, in the USA and within Africa.
Farah Jasmine Griffin is Chair of African-American and African Diaspora Studies as well as Director of the Institute for Research in African American Studies and William B. Ransford Professor of English and Comparative Literature and African-American Studies …
Farah Jasmine Griffin is Chair of African-American and African Diaspora Studies as well as Director of the Institute for Research in African American Studies and William B. Ransford Professor of English and Comparative Literature and African-American Studies at Columbia University. She is the author of Who Set You Flowin?: The African American Migration Narrative; Beloved Sisters and Loving Friends: Letters from Rebecca Primus of Royal Oak, Maryland, and Addie Brown of Hartford Connecticut, 1854-1868; If You Can’t Be Free, Be a Mystery: In Search of Billie Holiday and co-author, with Salim Washington, of Clawing At the Limits of Cool: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and the Greatest Jazz Collaboration Ever. Her most recent book is Harlem Nocturne: Women Artists and Progressive Politics During World War II.
Hilton Als became a staff writer at The New Yorker in 1994 and a theatre critic in 2002. Als edited the catalogue for the 1994-95 Whitney Museum of American Art exhibition …
Hilton Als became a staff writer at The New Yorker in 1994 and a theatre critic in 2002. Als edited the catalogue for the 1994-95 Whitney Museum of American Art exhibition Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art. He is the author of The Women and White Girls, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the winner of the Lambda Literary Award. He won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 2017. He is an associate professor of writing at Columbia University’s School of the Arts and has taught at Yale University, Wesleyan and Smith College.
Carolyn Denard is the editor of What Moves at the Margin: Selected Non-Fiction by Toni Morrison and Toni Morrison: Conversations, a collection of interviews. She received her PhD in American Studies from Emory University …
Carolyn Denard is the editor of What Moves at the Margin: Selected Non-Fiction by Toni Morrison and Toni Morrison: Conversations, a collection of interviews. She received her PhD in American Studies from Emory University, where she focused on twentieth century American literature and cultural history and where she completed a doctoral dissertation on Toni Morrison. She has received post-doctoral research fellowships from the American Association of University Women, the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard University and the Women’s Studies Program at Emory University. She is founder of the Toni Morrison Society and served as the Society’s first president and as the Society’s Board Chair, a position she has held since 1996. She is currently completing a book- length manuscript entitled Tar Women and Magical Men: Myth and Heroism in Toni Morrison’s Fiction.
A series of lectures on Toni Morrison’s novels featuring a group of the nation’s most celebrated Black scholars, critics and writers.
Online Class