Bucknell’s Griot Institute for Africana Studies will present award winning author Edwidge Danticat for a free, public talk entitled “The Black Unfamiliar in the 21st Century: (Re)Writing the Black Immigrant Experience” on Wednesday, Feb. 27 at 7 p.m. in the Elaine Langone Center’s Forum. The talk was postponed from Jan. 30 and is part of the Griot Institute Spring 2019 Lecture and Performance Series, “The Black Unfamiliar in the 21st Century.”
Danticat is author of several books, including Breath, Eyes, Memory; an Oprah Book Club selection, Krik? Krak!; a National Book Award finalist, The Farming of Bones, The Dew Breaker, Create Dangerously, and Claire of the Sea Light. She is also the editor of The Butterfly’s Way: Voices from the Haitian Dyaspora in the United States, Best American Essays 2011, Haiti Noir and Haiti Noir 2. She has written six books for children and young adults, Anacaona, Behind the Mountains, Eight Days, The Last Mapou, Mama’s Nightingale, Untwine, as well as a travel narrative, After the Dance. Her memoir, Brother, I’m Dying, was a 2007 finalist for the National Book Award and a 2008 winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography. She is a 2009 MacArthur fellow. Her latest book, The Art of Death: Writing the Final Story, was published in July 2017.
The Griot Institute invites the campus community to participate in its spring series, which considers the ways that scholars, artists and practitioners have reconsidered familiar aspects of black culture, intellectual inquiry, and artistic production and have troubled traditional notions of black familiarity. These endeavors range from a reimagining of black theological traditions in terms of secular humanism, demythologizing of the realities of contemporary black immigration and asylum policy, and a rewriting of Confederate histories in light of black experience.
For additional information, contact the Griot Institute at griot@bucknell.edu or 570-577-2123.