Elif Batuman’s first novel, The Idiot, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and for the Women’s Prize. The sequel, Either/Or, was published in 2022. She has been a staff writer at New Yorker since 2010. Photo: Valentyn Kuzan
Tavia Nyong’o is a Professor of Theater & Performance Studies, Professor of American Studies, and Professor of African-American Studies at Yale University. His first book, The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory (2009) won the Errol Hill award for the best book in black theater and performance studies. His second book, Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life (2018) won the Barnard Hewitt award for best book in theater and performance studies. Departing from millennial debates over post-blackness and afro-pessimism, Nyong’o argued that the drama of black life exceeds the social conditions that seek to negate it.
About Panelists
David Leeming is an emeritus professor of English at the University of Connecticut in Storrs. His B.A. is from Princeton University, his Ph.D from New York University. In the 1960s Leeming worked as an assistant to James Baldwin in New York and Istanbul. In 1994, Knopf published his biography of Baldwin, a work that had been authorized by Baldwin himself. In 1998, Oxford University Press published his biography of Baldwin's close friend, Beauford Delaney. Leeming was also a lifelong friend of Sedat Pakay.
Robert F. Reid-Pharr Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University. He 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.
Magdalena J. Zaborowska is Professor of Afro-American and American Studies in the Departments of American Culture and Afroamerican and African Studies, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor. She authored the MLA award-winning James Baldwin’s Turkish Decade: Erotics of Exile (Duke UP 2009), Me and My House: James Baldwin’s Last Decade in France (Duke UP, 2018). Forthcoming is her book James Baldwin: The Life Album (Yale UP, Black Lives, 2025).
Right, Portrait of James Baldwin, 1964. © Sedat Pakay.
Below, Baldwin sitting in a Triumph Herald on the Bosphorus Ferry © Sedat Pakay.
About the exhibition
Marking James Baldwin’s centennial, the exhibition Turkey Saved My Life: Baldwin in Istanbul, 1961–1971 captures an exceptionally fertile period for the incomparable author, defined by his sojourn to a country that would allow him to gain critical distance from, and new perspectives on, America and its poisonous currents of racism and homophobia. Consisting of over 55 photographs by Turkish photographer Sedat Pakay, one of Baldwin’s close friends, the exhibition provides an intimate travelogue portrait of an understudied yet pivotal time in Baldwin’s life, wherein he wrote The Fire Next Time, Another Country and other vital texts.
BPL PRESENTS, Co-curated by Atesh M. Gundogdu
