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Mining History

  • Online (Virtual) 2021 PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature New York, NY United States (map)

In their stirring recent works, Fatima Shaik, Kaitlyn Greenidge, and Saidiya V. Hartman recover lost and untold stories from the early history of Black freedom in America, starting with the Reconstruction era.

Whiting Award-winner Kaitlyn Greenidge joins these nonfiction writers with her novel, Libertie, which follows a freeborn Black girl’s journey from Reconstruction-era Brooklyn to Haiti and her mother, who becomes one of the first Black female doctors in U.S. history. The “sheer force of Greenidge’s vision” propels a novel that’s a “feat of monumental imagination” (The New York Times), a work that’s “psychologically astute, with an eye for nuance and a deep awareness of the ways that history influences the present” (NPR).

Award-winning author and scholar Saidiya V. Hartman was awarded the 2021 PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction in honor of her most recent book, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments. The New York Times critic Parul Seghal calls Hartman “a sleuth of the archive,” and labels her book “an exhilarating work of history about daring adventures in love” undertaken by Black women from Reconstruction through to the Harlem Renaissance.

In Economy Hall, Shaik gives vivid new life to 19th century ledgers her father rescued from the trash of an about-to-be-leveled building over half a century ago—approximately 3,000 handwritten pages revealing the goings-on of the progressive society the ledgers’ writer, a Haitian-American man named Ludger Boguille, co-founded in 1836.

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May 20

Commemorate the 100th Anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre

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May 21

On Revolutionary Love and Poetic Resistance