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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.
Aug 26: Paradise with Autumn Womack (online) Sep 23: Love with Dana Williams (online) Oct 28: A Mercy with Rich Blint (online) Dec 2: Home with Namwali Serpell (online) Jan 13: God Help the Child with Elleza Kelley (online) Mar 31: The Black Book with Saidiya Hartman (in person and online)
Online programs:An access link will be emailed to you after purchase
In-person programs:
Adults must show proof of vaccination in order to:
Autumn Womack is the author of The Matter of Black Living: The Aesthetic Experiment of Racial Data, 1880-1930. Her second project, “The Reprint Revolution,” considers the circulation politics and practices …
Autumn Womack is the author of The Matter of Black Living: The Aesthetic Experiment of Racial Data, 1880-1930. Her second project, “The Reprint Revolution,” considers the circulation politics and practices that brought many nineteenth-century African American literary texts into the marketplace in the 1960s. At Princeton, she teaches classes on 19th and 20th century African American literature and the history of race and media. Womack has been the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including a postdoctoral fellowship at Rutgers University’s Department of English and a faculty fellowship at Penn State’s Center for the History of Information.
Dana Williams is Chair and Professor at Howard’s African American Literature Department of English. She was a faculty fellow at the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke University …
Dana Williams is Chair and Professor at Howard’s African American Literature Department of English. She was a faculty fellow at the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke University. Dr. Williams has written numerous works, such as Contemporary African American Female Playwrights: an Annotated Bibliography and In the Light of Likeness—Transformed: The Literary Art of Leon Forrest. She has also co-edited August Wilson and Black Aesthetics with Sandra G. Shannon. Williams has published articles in CLA Journal, African American Review, Bulletin of Bibliography, Langston Hughes Review, Zora Neale Hurston Forum and Studies in American Fiction.
Rich Blint is a scholar, writer, and curator. He is currently Assistant Professor of Literature in the Department of Literary Studies, Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts at The New School …
Rich Blint is a scholar, writer, and curator. He is currently Assistant Professor of Literature in the Department of Literary Studies, Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts at The New School. He is the author of A Radical Interiority: James Baldwin and the Personified Self in Modern American Culture and A Queer Spirit: Incidents in the Life of the Americas. His writing has appeared in Anthropology Now, African American Review, The James Baldwin Review, The Brooklyn Rail and sx visualities. He has received fellowships from the Andrew W. Mellon and Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship foundations.
Namwali Serpell was born in Lusaka. Her first novel, The Old Drift, won the Anisfield-Wolf Book, the Arthur C. Clarke Award for science fiction, the Grand Prix des Associations Littéraires Prize for Belles-Lettres …
Namwali Serpell was born in Lusaka. Her first novel, The Old Drift, won the Anisfield-Wolf Book, the Arthur C. Clarke Award for science fiction, the Grand Prix des Associations Littéraires Prize for Belles-Lettres and the L.A. Times’ Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. It was also named one of the 100 Notable Books by the New York Times Book Review. She is a co-recipient of a 2020 Windham-Campbell Prize for fiction, with Yiyun Li. She is a Professor of English at Harvard University. Her book of essays, Stranger Faces, was long-listed for a Believer Book Award for Nonfiction and a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism.
Elleza Kelley is a Postdoctoral Associate at Yale University in the departments of English and African American Studies. Her current book project explores black spatial knowledge and practice through African American literature and visual art …
Elleza Kelley is a Postdoctoral Associate at Yale University in the departments of English and African American Studies. Her current book project explores black spatial knowledge and practice through African American literature and visual art. A co-founder of the Black Student Alliance at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, she acts as a senior advisor, programming symposia and producing publications related to blackness and architecture. Kelley writes and teaches on a range of subjects from black aesthetics and black geographies to historical fiction. Her writing can be found in Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography, The New Inquiry, Cabinet Magazine and elsewhere.
Saidiya Hartman is the author of Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route and Scenes of Subjection …
Saidiya Hartman is the author of Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route and Scenes of Subjection. A MacArthur “Genius” Fellow, she has been a Guggenheim Fellow, Cullman Fellow and Fulbright Scholar. She is a University Professor at Columbia University and lives in New York.