Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror: Memoirs by Rojas Contreras, Sinclair & Lopate with Ken Chen

Co-Presented by the Brooklyn Book Festival and BPL Presents, three authors discuss their memoirs with Ken Chen.

Interweaving family stories more enchanting than those in any novel, Ingrid Rojas Contreras writes, in The Man Who Could Move Mountains, a luminous testament to the power of storytelling as a healing art and an invitation to embrace the extraordinary. How to Say Babylon is Safiya Sinclair’s reckoning with Rastafari, the culture that initially nourished but ultimately sought to silence her. Phillip Lopate’s A Year and a Day, is at once a self-portrait, a picture of the times, and a splendid new elaboration of what the essay can be. Moderated by Ken Chen.

In The Man Who Could Move Mountains, spurred by a shared dream among Mami and her sisters and her own powerful urge to relearn family history in the aftermath of her memory loss, Rojas Contreras writes her way through the incomprehensible and into her inheritance, as she joins her mother on a journey home to Colombia to disinter her grandfather Nono’s remains. Rich in lyricism and language only a poet could evoke, How to Say Babylon is Sinclair’s reckoning with patriarchy and tradition, and the legacy of colonialism in Jamaica; it features a universal story of a woman finding her own power and a unique glimpse into a rarefied world we may know how to name, Rastafari, but one we know little about.

In 2016, Phillip Lopate turned his attention to the art of the blog, committing himself to writing a weekly entry. What emerged was A Year and a Day, a collection of forty-seven essays best characterized as a single essay a year in the making. Lopate's topics include family, James Baldwin, a trip to China, Agnes Martin, Abbas Kiarostami, the resistible rise of Donald Trump, death, desire, and the tribulations, small and large, of daily life.

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Participants

Ingrid Rojas Contreras was born and raised in Bogotá, Colombia. Her first novel Fruit of the Drunken Tree was the silver medal winner in First Fiction from the California Book Awards, and a New York Times editor’s choice. Her essays and short stories have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Believer, and Zyzzyva, among others. She lives in California.

Safiya Sinclair was born and raised in Montego Bay, Jamaica. She is the author of the poetry collection Cannibal, winner of a Whiting Writers’ Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Metcalf Award in Literature, the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Poetry, and the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry. Cannibal was selected as one of the American Library Association’s Notable Books of the Year, was a finalist for the PEN Center USA Literary Award and the Seamus Heaney First Book Award in the UK, and was longlisted for the PEN Open Book Award and the Dylan Thomas Prize.

Phillip Lopate is the author of the essay collections Against Joie de Vivre, Bachelorhood, and Portrait of My Body. He has also written the novels The Rug Merchant and Confessions of a Summer. Lopate is the editor of The Art of the Personal Essay and the Library of America’s Writing New York, as well as the series editor of The Art of the Essay. His film criticism appears regularly in The New York Times and other publications. He lives in Brooklyn, New York. Phillip Lopate’s The Glorious American Essay was published by Pantheon Books in November 2020.

Ken Chen is an Assistant Professor and the Associate Director of Creative Writing at Barnard College of Columbia University. His next book, tentatively titled Death Star, is forthcoming and follows his journey to the underworld to rescue his father and his encounters there with those destroyed by colonialism. His poetry collection, Juvenilia, was selected for the Yale Series of Younger Poets by Louise Glück, who wrote, “Like only the best poets, Ken Chen makes with his voice a new category.”