Authors Farah Jasmine Griffin (In Search of a Beautiful Freedom, Read Until I Understand), Candice Iloh (Every Body Looking), and Ibi Zoboi (Star Child: A Biographical Constellation of Octavia Estelle Butler, American Street) join an intergenerational conversation on the writing practices of Black writers today and writers featured in the recently republished Black Women Writers at Work by Claudia Tate. Yahdon Israel, Senior Editor at Simon & Schuster will moderate the conversation. About the Speakers Farah Jasmine Griffin is professor of African American and African diaspora studies and English and comparative literature at Columbia University. She is the author of In Search of a Beautiful Freedom: New and Selected Essays, Read Until You Understand, among other works. Recipient of a 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship, she lives in New York. Candice Iloh is a first-generation Nigerian American writer whose books center home. They are from the Midwest by way of Washington, DC, and Brooklyn, New York. They are a proud alumna of the Rhode Island Writers Colony, and their work has earned fellowships from Lambda Literary, VONA, and Kimbilio Fiction and a residency with Hi-ARTS, where they debuted their first one-person show in 2018. Candice became a 2020 National Book Award Finalist and, in 2021, a Printz Award Honoree for their debut novel, Every Body Looking. Salt the Water is their third novel. Ibi Zoboi is the author of numerous titles including American Street (2017), which was a finalist for the 2017 National Book Award in Young Adult’s Literature, a Time Magazine Best YA Book Of All Time, and a Kirkus Best Book of the Year; Pride (2018), a contemporary remix of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice; and My Life As An Ice Cream Sandwich (2020), a moving middle-grade debut of a girl finding her place in a world that’s changing at warp speed. Zoboi is also the co-author of the Walter Award and L.A. Times Book Prize-winning Punching the Air (2021) with prison reform activist Dr. Yusef Salaam. Her more recent titles include Okoye to the People: A Black Panther Novel (2022) for Marvel; Star Child (2023), an illumination of the young life of the visionary storyteller Octavia E. Butler in poems and prose; and the novel Nigeria Jones (2023).
New York City, NY; NYC