The Fire This Time: Baldwin & the Essay (ASL)

Room: Society, Sciences & Technology, 2nd Floor

On the occasion of James Baldwin's Centenary, three authors, intellectuals and Baldwin readers, Edwidge Danticat, Darryl Pinckney, Robert Reid-Pharr discuss the legacy of Baldwin as an essayist.

Edwidge Danticat is the author of We’re Alone, Everything Inside, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in fiction, and The Art of Death, a National Book Critics Award finalist in criticism. She lives in New York and teaches at Columbia University.

Darryl Pinckney Darryl Pinckney is the author of two novels, High Cotton and Black Deutschland, three works of non-fiction, Out There: Mavericks of Black Literature, Blackballed: The Black Vote and US Democracy, and Busted in New York and Other Essays, and a memoir, Come Back in September: A Literary Education on West 67th Street, Manhattan. 

Robert F. Reid-Pharr, Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University, has been the Jess and Sara Cloud Distinguished Visiting Professor of English at the College of William and Mary, the Edward Said Visiting Chair of American Studies at the American University of Beirut, the Drue Heinz Visiting Professor of English at the University of Oxford, the Carlisle and Barbara Moore Distinguished Visiting Professor of English at the University of Oregon, and the F.O. Matthiessen Visiting Professor of Gender and Sexuality at Harvard University. A prominent scholar in the field of race and sexuality studies, he is the author of four books and numerous essays. In 2015 he was inducted into the Johns Hopkins Society of Scholars and he is the recipient of a 2016 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship.