Tess Chakkalakal Discusses A Matter of Complexion with Rebecca Carroll
Brooklyn Heights Library welcomes author Tess Chakkalakal to discuss A Matter of Complexion: The Life and Fictions of Charles W. Chesnutt with writer and cultural critic Rebecca Carroll.
In A Matter of Complexion, Tess Chakkalakal gives readers the first comprehensive biography of Charles W. Chesnutt. A complex and talented man, Chesnutt was born in 1858 in Cleveland to parents who were considered “mixed race.” He spent his early life in North Carolina after the Civil War. Though light-skinned, Chesnutt remained a member of the black community throughout his life. He studied among students at the State Colored Normal School who were formerly enslaved. He became a teacher in rural North Carolina during Reconstruction. His life in the South of those years, the issue of race, and how he himself identified as Black informed much of his later writing. He went on to become the first Black writer whose stories appeared in The Atlantic Monthly and whose books were published by Houghton Mifflin.
Through his literary work, as a writer, critic, and speaker, Chesnutt transformed the publishing world by crossing racial barriers that divided black writers from white and seamlessly including both Black and white characters in his writing. In A Matter of Complexion Chakkalakal pens the biography of a poor teacher raised in rural North Carolina during Reconstruction who became the first professional African American writer to break into the all-white literary establishment and win admirers as diverse as William Dean Howells, Booker T. Washington, Ida B. Wells, and Lorraine Hansberry.
Please RSVP in advance as registration space is limited. After the discussion, there will be a Q&A with the audience and signing. Copies will be available for sale from Word Bookstore.
PARTICIPANTS
Tess Chakkalakal teaches African-American and American Literature at Bowdoin College. Her writing has appeared in The New England Quarterly, J19, American Literary History, and many others. She is the author of Novel Bondage: Slavery, Marriage, and Freedom in Nineteenth-Century America (Illinois UP, 2011) and co-editor of Jim Crow, Literature, and the Legacy of Sutton E. Griggs (University of Georgia Press, 2013) and Imperium in Imperio: A Critical Edition (West Virginia UP, 2022). She is co-host and creator of the award-winning podcast Dead Writers: A Show About Great American Authors and Where They Lived. She is the recipient of the 2025 Sylvia Lyons Render Award for her contribution to Charles W. Chesnutt studies. She lives in Brunswick, Maine.
Rebecca Carroll is a writer and cultural critic, and editor at large for The Meteor media collective. Her writing has been published widely, and she is the author of several nonfiction books, including her recent memoir, Surviving the White Gaze, which was called "gorgeous and powerful" by the New York Times.
