LANGSTON HUGHES STAGE
WORDS LIKE FREEDOOM
There are words like Freedom
Sweet and wonderful to say.
On my heart-strings freedom sings
All day everyday.
There are words like Liberty
That almost make me cry.
If you had known what I knew
You would know why.
REFUGEE IN AMERICA
by Langston Hughes
SCHOMBURG CENTER LITERARY FESTIVAL SCHEDULE
**More to come! Check back for updates.**
PRE-FESTIVAL EVENT!
Dear Senthuran: A Black Spiritual Memoir
June 8 | 7:00 PM (ET)
Presented in Partnership with LIVE from NYPL
The bestselling author shares their debut work of nonfiction, Dear Senthuran, a memoir that "deeply engages with the metaphysics of Black spirit and singularly faces the Black reader." Akwaeke Emezi speaks with Saidiya Hartman about their revelatory account of storytelling, self, and survival.
MONDAY
June 14 | 6:30 PM (ET)
Land of the Free
Natalie Baszile’s debut novel, Queen Sugar, and her latest anthology, We Are Each Other's Harvest, elevate the voices and stories of black farmers. She joins us in examining Black people’s connection to the American land from Emancipation to today.
Featuring Natalie Baszile
Moderated by Dara Cooper, activist and organizer, National Black Food and Justice Alliance
TUESDAY
June 15 | 6:30 PM (ET)
Two Freedoms: Speech and Guns
Carol Anderson author of The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America and Ellis Cose, author of The Short Life and Curious Death of Free Speech in America take us through our fraught history with the first and second amendments to the U.S. Constitution.
Featuring Ellis Cose and Carol Anderson
Moderated by Dr. C. Nicole Mason, president and chief executive officer of the Institute for Women’s Policy Research
WEDNESDAY
June 16 | 6:30 PM (ET)
Freedom to Publish
As news outlets laud a new Black renaissance in the visual and literary arts, Dr. Haki Madhubuti, founder and Publisher of Third World Press and Chris Jackson, Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of One World, discuss the challenges and freedoms that come with choosing what gets published and subverting dominant narratives.
Featuring Dr. Haki Madhubuti and Chris Jackson
Moderated by Brian Tate
THURSDAY
June 17 | MULTIPLE PROGRAMS | 1:00 - 7:00 PM (ET)
No Small Voice
Join us for a half-day of readings, panel discussions, and more for young people, featuring prose and poetry, comic books and storybooks.
1:00 PM (ET)
Jupiter Invincible
By Yusef Komunyakaa, illustrated by Ashley A. Wood, and Ram Devineni, AR Creator
Moderated by Tim Fielder
Jupiter Invincible is an augmented reality comic book series about an African-American enslaved person, Jupiter, who is suddenly given the power of immortality. The story takes place on a Southern plantation near Baltimore before the U.S. Civil War. The project is a mixture of pop-culture, history, innovative technology, and dynamic storytelling to address structural racism. We believe bold new stories and narratives are needed to create a cultural shift and challenge perceptions about race in America. The comic is funded by the National Endowment for the Arts and written by Pulitzer Prize winning poet Yusef Komunyakaa.
2:30 PM (ET)
Chlorine Sky
By Mahogany L. Browne
Moderated by Kadiatou Tubman
Chlorine Sky is a novel-in-verse about a young girl coming-of-age and stepping out of the shadow of her former best friend. With gritty and heartbreaking honesty, Mahogany L. Browne delivers a novel-in-verse about broken promises, fast rumors, and when growing up means growing apart from your best friend.
4:00 PM (ET)
Born Ready: The True Story of a Boy Named Penelope
By Jodie Patterson
Penelope knows that he’s a boy. (And a ninja.) The problem is getting everyone else to realize it. In this exuberant companion to Jodie Patterson’s adult memoir, The Bold World, Patterson shares her son Penelope’s frustrations and triumphs on his journey to share himself with the world. Penelope’s experiences show children that it always makes you stronger when you are true to yourself and who you really are.
The ABCs of Black History
By Rio Cortez
B is for Beautiful, Brave, and Bright! And for a Book that takes a Bold journey through the alphabet of Black history and culture. Letter by letter, The ABCs of Black History celebrates a story that spans continents and centuries, triumph and heartbreak, creativity and joy. It’s a story of big ideas––P is for Power, S is for Science and Soul. Of significant moments––G is for Great Migration. Of iconic figures––H is for Zora Neale Hurston, X is for Malcom X. It’s an ABC book like no other, and a story of hope and love.
Ruby’s Reunion Day Dinner
By Angela Dalton
This joyful picture book taps into the rich African American tradition of family reunions, with delicious food at the heart of the celebration. Once a year, each of Ruby’s relatives prepares a special dish to share at their family reunion. Daddy calls it their “signature dish”—and Ruby wants one of her own. This sweet picture book is filled with the tenderness and warmth of this multigenerational extended family and the food they share.
Moderated by Kadiatou Tubman, Manager of Education Programs and Outreach,
Schomburg Center
5:30 PM (ET)
Black Boy Joy!
with Isaac Fitzsimons, Kwame Mbalia, and Julian Winters
Join us for conversation with Issac Fitzsimons about his debut YA novel The Passing Playbook, a feel good teen romance about a trans athlete who must decide between fighting for his right to play and staying stealth. Brein Lopez of Children’s Book World said, “Isaac Fitzsimons has scored a goal for Trans Boy Joy." We continue the exploration of joy with Kwame Mbalia, author of the Tristan series and editor of the forthcoming collection Black Boy Joy , and contributor, Julian Winters, author of YA LGBT fiction. Black Boy Joy celebrates the joys of Black boyhood with stories from seventeen bestselling, critically acclaimed Black authors.
SATURDAY
June 19 | 10:30 AM - 5:30 PM (ET)
Words Like Freedom
We are celebrating Juneteenth with an incredible line up of authors from across the globe, whose works of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry celebrate and interrogate the sweet refrain of freedom’s song in our everyday lives.
10:30 (ET)
JUNETEENTH OPENING PROGRAM
TWO VIRTUAL STAGES | TEN PROGRAMS
SATURDAY
June 19 | 12:00 PM (ET)
HOW THE WORD IS PASSED:
A Reckoning With the History of Slavery Across America
By Clint Smith
Beginning in his hometown of New Orleans, Clint Smith leads the reader on an unforgettable tour of monuments and landmarks—those that are honest about the past and those that are not—that offer an intergenerational story of how slavery has been central in shaping our nation’s collective history, and ourselves.
Moderated by Dr. Andrea Roberts
SATURDAY
June 19 | 12:15 PM (ET)
One Drop: Shifting the Lens on Race
By Dr. Yaba Blay
One Drop explores the extent to which historical definitions of race continue to shape contemporary racial identities and lived experiences of racial difference. Featuring the perspectives of 60 contributors representing 25 countries and combining candid narratives with striking portraiture, this book provides living testimony to the diversity of Blackness.
Moderated by Dr. Courtney R. Baker
SATURDAY
June 19 | 1:00 PM (ET)
Prayer for the Living
By Ben Okri
Playful, frightening, even shocking—the stories in this collection blur the lines between illusion and reality. This is a writer at the height of his power, making the reader think, making them laugh, and sometimes making them want to look away while holding their gaze. Stories here are set in London, in Byzantium, in the ghetto, in the Andes, in a printer's shop in Spain. The characters include a murderer, a writer, a detective, a man in a cave, a man in a mirror, two little boys, a prison door, and the author himself.
Moderated by Chris Abani
SATURDAY
June 19 | 1:15 PM (ET)
Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, reading and conversation with incoming Schomburg Director, Joy Bivins
The Age of Phillis (Poetry)
In 1773, a young, African American woman named Phillis Wheatley published a book of poetry that challenged Western prejudices about African and female intellectual capabilities. Based on fifteen years of archival research, The Age of Phillis, imagines the life and times of Wheatley: her childhood in the Gambia, West Africa, her life with her white American owners, her friendship with Obour Tanner, and her marriage to the enigmatic John Peters.
The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois (Novel)
The great scholar, W. E. B. Du Bois, once wrote about the Problem of race in America, and what he called “Double Consciousness,” a sensitivity that every African American possesses in order to survive. Since childhood, Ailey Pearl Garfield has understood Du Bois’s words all too well. To come to terms with her own identity, Ailey embarks on a journey through her family’s past, uncovering the shocking tales of generations of ancestors—Indigenous, Black, and white—in the deep South. In doing so Ailey must learn to embrace her full heritage, a legacy of oppression and resistance, bondage and independence, cruelty and resilience that is the story—and the song—of America itself.
SATURDAY
June 19 | 2:00 PM (ET)
Long Division
By Kiese Laymon
Written in a voice that’s alternately humorous, lacerating, and wise, Long Division features two interwoven stories. Brilliantly “skewering the disingenuous masquerade of institutional racism” (Publishers Weekly), this dreamlike “smart, funny, and sharp” (Jesmyn Ward), novel shows the work that young Black Americans must do, while living under the shadow of a history “that they only gropingly understand and must try to fill in for themselves” (The Wall Street Journal).
Let My People Vote: Battle to Restore the Civil Rights of Returning Citizens
By Desmond Meade
“You may think the right to vote is a small matter, and if you do, I would bet you have never had it taken away from you.” Thus begins the story of Desmond Meade and his inspiring journey to restore voting rights to roughly 1.4 million returning citizens in Florida—resulting in a stunning victory in 2018 that enfranchised the most people at once in any single initiative since women’s suffrage. Let My People Vote is the deeply moving, personal story of Meade’s life, his political activism, and the movement he spearheaded to restore voting rights to returning citizens who had served their terms.
Moderated by Reginald Dwayne Betts
SATURDAY
June 19 | 2:15 PM (ET)
Mama Phife Represent
By Cheryl Boyce-Taylor
Mama Phife Represent is a hybrid-story that follows the journey of a mother’s grieving heart through her first two years of public and private mourning. Told through a tapestry of narrative poems, dreams, anecdotes, journal entries, and letters, these treasured fragments of their lives show a great love between mother and son.
The Renunciations: Poems
by Donika Kelly
The Renunciations is a book of resilience, survival, and the journey to radically shift one’s sense of self in the face of trauma. Moving between a childhood marked by love and abuse and the breaking marriage of that adult child, Donika Kelly charts memory and the body as landscapes to be traversed and tended. These poems construct life rafts and sanctuaries even in their most devastating confrontations with what a person can bear, with how families harm themselves.
Moderated by Novella Ford, Associate Director, Public Programs and Exhibitions, Schomburg Center
SATURDAY
June 19 | 3:00 PM (ET)
A Girl is a Body of Water
By Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi
In her thirteenth year, Kirabo confronts a piercing question: who is my mother? Kirabo has been raised by women in the small Ugandan village of Nattetta―her grandmother, her best friend, and her many aunts―but the absence of her mother follows her like a shadow. Seeking answers from Nsuuta, the local witch, Kirabo learns about the woman who birthed her, who she discovers is alive but not ready to meet. Nsuuta also helps Kirabo understand the emergence of a mysterious second self, a headstrong and confusing force inside her―this, says Nsuuta, is a streak of the “first woman”: an independent, original state that has been all but lost to women.
Moderated by Dr. Ainehi Edoro-Glines, founder, Brittle Paper
SATURDAY
SATURDAY
June 19 | 4:30 PM (ET)
A Little Devil in America:
Notes in Praise of Black Performance
By Hanif Abdurraqib
READERS & WRITERS: A Conversation with Hanif Abdurraqib and Dawnie Walton
At the March on Washington in 1963, Josephine Baker was fifty-seven years old, well beyond her most prolific days. But in her speech she was in a mood to consider her life, her legacy, her departure from the country she was now triumphantly returning to. “I was a devil in other countries, and I was a little devil in America, too,” she told the crowd. Inspired by these few words, Hanif Abdurraqib has written a profound and lasting reflection on how Black performance is inextricably woven into the fabric of American culture. Dawnie Walton, is a fiction writer and journalist whose work explores identity, place, and the influence of pop culture. Her debut novel, The Final Revival of Opal & Nev, centers a dynamic performance and photo that changes the legacy of an unlikely rock duo, that "feels truer and more mesmerizing than some true stories." according to the NY Times Book Review.
