Bernardine Evaristo (Credit: Jennie Scott) and Marlon James (Credit: Literary Hub).

Bernardine Evaristo and Marlon James will be in conversation at Columbia University, New York, in March. The Booker Prize winners are two of the three recent Black recipients of the prize: James won in 2015 for A Brief History of Seven Killings, the first Jamaican to do so, and Evaristo in 2019 for Girl, Woman, Other, the first Black woman and first Black British person to do so. The third recent Black winner is Paul Beatty, for The Sellout, which made him the first American winner of the prize since it opened to Americans. So many firsts.

The conversation will be hosted by Columbia’s The Heyman Center for the Humanities, and will take place in its Pulitzer Hall (formerly Journalism Hall), located in the Joseph D. Jamail Lecture Hall, on Thursday, March 26, 2020. The time: 6:15 p.m. It will be moderated by Barnard College Africana Studies professor Kaiama Glover.

https://twitter.com/BernardineEvari/status/1219877005124161536?s=19

Evaristo, founder of the Brunel International African Poetry Prize and The Complete Works mentoring scheme, is the author of seven other books, including the novels Blonde Roots (2008), Mr Loverman (2013), The Emperor’s Babe (2001), Soul Tourists (2005), and Lara (2009), the novella Hello Mum (2010), and the poetry collection Island of Abraham (1994). A professor of creative writing at Brunel University, London, her oeuvre “is characterized by experimentation, subversion, and challenging the myths of various Afro-diasporic histories and identities.”

James’s other books include John Crow’s Devil (2005), The Book of Night Women (2009), and Black Leopard, Red Wolf (2019). He teaches English and creative writing at Macalester College.

The event is sponsored by The Society of Fellows, the School of the Arts, The Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma, and Barnard Center for Research on Women.

We will bring you more details.