On 17 April, Sankofa Video Books & Café in Washington DC hosts an evening that brings together two of the most important voices in Black and African diaspora literary culture. Sierra Leonean-British scholar-activist and poet Dr. Kadija George Sesay will read from her poetry collection Irki, a word meaning “home” in the Nubian language, and discuss her Pan-African literary projects in conversation with Professor Carole Boyce Davies. Dr Sesay will be the first reader for the new Howard University African Diaspora Literatures Chair’s Series at Sankofa.

Dr Sesay is a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at Howard University and the Kluge Center at the Library of Congress for 2025/26. Her editorial work includes Encounters with James Baldwin: Celebrating 100 Years, and she is co-editor, with the late Benjamin Zephaniah, of the forthcoming Black Radical: The Political Poetry of Black Britain. Her research centres on African diaspora magazines and Pan-Africanism, a body of work that makes Irki‘s central question, what does home mean?, all the more resonant coming from her.

In conversation with her is Professor Carole Boyce Davies, Chair of the English Department at Howard University and H.T. Rhodes Professor Emerita of Africana Studies and Literatures in English at Cornell. She is the author of the prize-winning Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones and the landmark Black Women, Writing and Identity: Migrations of the Subject.

The event runs from 6:30pm to 8:30pm at Sankofa, 2714 Georgia Ave NW, Washington DC. Entry is by donation, and book tickets for both Irki and Left of Karl Marx are available. Register here.