On November 11, 2021 (7:30pm ET; please note the special start time), the Center for Black Literature at Medgar Evers College, CUNY (CBL) will host an evening with Uwem Akpan, author of New York, My Village, which will be published in November 2, 2021, by WW Norton. Born in Akwa Ibom State in Nigeria, Uwem’s short stories and autobiographical pieces have appeared in the special editions of The New Yorker, Oprah magazine, and other publications.

In his upcoming immigrant story, New York, My Village, Uwem writes about the city with the same promise and pain we saw in his New York Times best-seller Say You’re One of Them (2008) which was the 2009 Oprah Book Club selection. Say You’re One of Them also won the Commonwealth Prize (Africa Region), the Open Book Prize, and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award.

Akpan has been a Fellow at the Black Mountain Institute (University of Nevada, Las Vegas; 2010), Institute for the Humanities (University of Michigan, 2011), Yaddo Foundation (Saratoga Springs, New York; 2012), the Cullman Center (the New York Public Library, 2013), and the Hang Center for Catholic Intellectual Heritage (Loyola University Chicago, 2017). Currently, he teaches in the University of Florida’s MFA Program.

To learn more about the author, visit www.uwemakpan.com. CBL’s founder and executive director, Dr. Brenda M. Greene, interviewed Akpan for the “Writers on Writing” radio program. Watch the reply on YouTube: https://youtu.be/QIyh-oU6dDI

NOTE: This program is still in development. Please check back soon for updates.

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This event is a part of the John Oliver Killens Reading Series, one of the popular CBL programs. Learn more at www.centerforblackliterature.org/john-oliver-killens-reading-series

MEET OUR EVENT PARTNERS

• We are grateful to the Amazon Literary Partnership for support of the John Oliver Killens Reading Series.

• We also thank our decades-long partner, the African American Literature Book Club (AALBC). You can purchase the authors’ book HERE.

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AKILA WORKSONGS is the communications agency for the Center for Black Literature. Media inquiries are directed to pr@akilaworksongs.com or via Twitter (@akilaworksongs). | Author photo by Aaron Hayes.

On December 9, 2021 (6:30pm ET), the Center for Black Literature at Medgar Evers College, CUNY (CBL) will host an evening Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, author of The Love Songs of W. E. B. Du Bois (Harper/HarperCollins, 2021), an epic novel that explores the history of an African American family in the American South, from the time before the American civil war and slavery, through the Civil Rights Movement, to the present. Honorée Fanonne Jeffers is an American poet, essayist, novelist, and a professor of English at the University of Oklahoma.

She has published five collections of poetry, including The Age of Phillis (Wesleyan University Press, 2020), which won the NAACP Image Award of Outstanding Literary Work in Poetry and was longlisted for a National Book Award.

To learn more about the offer, visit her official website www.honoreejeffers.com/

Praise for The Love Songs of W. E. B. Du Bois

“This sweeping, brilliant and beautiful narrative is at once a love song to Black girlhood, family, history, joy, pain… and so much more. In Jeffers’ deft hands, the story of race and love in America becomes thegreat American novel.”

— Jacqueline Woodson, author of Red at the Bone and Another Brooklyn

“If you read one book this year, choose this one. I went to bed thinking of Ailey Pearl Garfield and woke up thinking of her. With the arrival of this epic novel of family, race, and ancestral legacy, one of America’s finest poets has announced herself as a storyteller of the highest magnitude. Absolutely brilliant.”

—Dolen Perkins-Valdez, author of Wench and Balm

“As one of the most prolific poets of our time, Jeffers has penned a family saga that is just as brilliant as it is necessary, just as intimate as it is expansive. An outstanding portrait of an American family and in turn, an outstanding portrait of America.”

—Angie Thomas, author of The Hate U GivE

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This event is a part of the John Oliver Killens Reading Series, one of the popular CBL programs. Learn more at www.centerforblackliterature.org/john-oliver-killens-reading-series

MEET OUR EVENT PARTNERS

• We are grateful to the Amazon Literary Partnership for support of the John Oliver Killens Reading Series.

• We also thank our decades-long partner, the African American Literature Book Club (AALBC). You can purchase the authors’ book HERE.

…………….

AKILA WORKSONGS is the communications agency for the Center for Black Literature. Media inquiries are directed to pr@akilaworksongs.com or via Twitter (@akilaworksongs).