Event box

Greenwich Reads Together: James

Greenwich Library welcomes author Percival Everett to discuss the 2024 Greenwich Reads Together selection, James in conversation with Dr. Jelani Cobb, staff writer at The New Yorker as well as Dean of Columbia Journalism School.

When the enslaved Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a man in New Orleans, separated from his wife and daughter forever, he decides to hide on nearby Jackson Island until he can formulate a plan. Meanwhile, Huck Finn has faked his own death to escape his violent father, recently returned to town. As all readers of American literature know, thus begins the dangerous and transcendent journey by raft down the Mississippi River toward the elusive and too-often-unreliable promise of the Free States and beyond.

Books will be available for sales and signing through Diane's Books. Greenwich Reads Together is supported by the Friends of Greenwich Library.

This program will be livestreamed to the Library's YouTube channel during the event - no sign-up required. We will also offer an overflow livestream to the Marx Family Black Box Theater if we exceed capacity in the Berkley Theater.

Date:
Wednesday, October 16, 2024
Time:
7:00pm - 8:30pm
Location:
Berkley Theater
Audience:
  Everyone  
Categories:
  Author Talk     Friends  

Registration is required. There are no seats available but a waiting list is available.

PERCIVAL EVERETT is a Distinguished Professor of English at USC. His latest novel, James, was published in March of 2024 to critical acclaim. His other titles include Dr. No (finalist for the NBCC Award for Fiction and winner of the PEN/ Jean Stein Book Award), The Trees (finalist for the Booker Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction), Telephone (finalist for the Pulitzer Prize), So Much Blue, Erasure, and I Am Not Sidney Poitier. He has received the NBCC Ivan Sandrof Life Achievement Award and The Windham Campbell Prize from Yale University. American Fiction, the feature film based on his novel Erasure, was released in 2023 and was awarded the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, the writer Danzy Senna, and their children.

DR. JELANI COBB is the author of Substance of Hope: Barack Obama and the Paradox of Progress, and To the Break of Dawn: A Freestyle on the Hip Hop Aesthetic, among others. He is the Dean of the Columbia School of Journalism, a long-time staff writer at The New Yorker, and an editor of The New Yorker's anthology The Matter of Black Lives. He was prominently featured in Ava Duvernay's Oscar-nominated documentary 13th, and was the correspondent for two critically acclaimed PBS Frontline documentaries: Policing the Police and Whose Vote Counts. He has received a Peabody Award, the Hillman Prize for opinion and analysis journalism, and the Walter Bernstein Award from the Writers Guild of America.

Greenwich Reads Together is Greenwich Library’s community-wide reading experience which engages all of Greenwich in exploring a single book. In 2023, thousands of Greenwich residents read and participated in events around Solito, a memoir by poet and author Javier Zamora. Greenwich Reads Together is sponsored by the Friends of Greenwich Library.