F135.
Of the Diaspora: Rediscovering 21st-Century Black Literature
Friday, March 25, 2022
9:00 am to 10:00 am
Erica Vital-Lazare, editor of McSweeney's Of the Diaspora series, will discuss the series origin, selection process, and publicity strategy for this remarkable program. Launched in 2020, it identifies and republishes important previously published works by Black Americans with the goal of finding new contemporary audiences for works whose perspectives are more urgent today than ever. Titles include novels like Tragic Magic by Wesley Brown and historic photos with new essays by Lester and Aisha Sloan.
Participants
Erica Vital-Lazare is a professor of English at the College of Southern Nevada. A past recipient of a Hurston/Wright Award, she earned her MFA in creative writing from Virginia Commonwealth University and is editor of the series Of the Diaspora.
Aisha Sabatini Sloan is the author of the essay collections The Fluency of Light and Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit, as well as the forthcoming Borealis and Captioning the Archives. She is an assistant professor of creative nonfiction at the University of Michigan.
Marita Golden is a novelist and nonfiction writer and co-founder and president emerita of the Hurston/Wright Foundation. Her most recent book is The Strong Black Woman: How a Myth Endangers the Physical and Mental Health of Black Women.
