Baldwin: A Love Story

< All Events

Where

Annenberg Theater
at Main Museum

When

September 27, 2:00 - 3:00pm

Where

Annenberg Theater
at Main Museum

When

September 27, 2:00 - 3:00pm

BUY TICKETS

Price: $20 Members: Free

BUY TICKETS

Price: $20 Members: Free

Join us for a special evening celebrating the launch of Baldwin: A Love Story, the first major biography of James Baldwin in over thirty years.

Acclaimed author and scholar Nicholas Boggs will be in conversation with Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist, filmmaker, and author Jose Antonio Vargas.

Together, they will discuss Baldwin’s life, legacy, and the making of this groundbreaking new biography.

The event will also feature a live reading by Ron Butler, the voice behind the audiobook, bringing Baldwin’s world to life on stage.  

Following the program, there will be a book signing, with a select number of books available for purchase on site.

About the Book

Baldwin: A Love Story, the first major biography of James Baldwin in three decades, reveals how profoundly the writer’s personal relationships shaped his life and work.

Drawing on newly uncovered archival material and original research and interviews, this spellbinding book tells the overlapping stories of Baldwin’s most sustaining intimate and artistic relationships: with his mentor, the Black American painter Beauford Delaney; with his lover and muse, the Swiss painter Lucien Happersberger; and with his collaborators, the famed Turkish actor Engin Cezzar and the iconoclastic French artist Yoran Cazac, whose long-overlooked significance as Baldwin’s last great love is explored in these pages for the first time.

LEARN MORE

In Conversation


Nicholas Boggs was an undergraduate when he discovered James Baldwin’s out-of-print children’s book, Little Man, Little Man: A Story of Childhood, in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. After he tracked down its illustrator, the French artist Yoran Cazac, he went on to coedit an acclaimed new edition of the book in 2018. His writing has also been anthologized in The Cambridge Companion to James Baldwin, James Baldwin Now, and Speculative Light: The Arts of Beauford Delaney and James Baldwin. He is the recipient of a 2023 Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Beinecke Library and Gilder Lehrman Center at Yale, the Schomburg Center Scholars-in-Residence Program, and the National Humanities Center, as well as residencies at Yaddo and MacDowell. He received his BA in English from Yale, his MFA in creative writing from American University, and his PhD in English from Columbia. Born and raised in Washington, DC, he lives in Brooklyn, New York.

@nicholastboggs


Jose Antonio Vargas is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist, Emmy-nominated filmmaker, and Tony-nominated theatrical producer. He is the founder of Define American, a non-profit storytelling organization that has twice been named one of the World's Most Innovative Companies by Fast Company. His work across print, film, television, and theater explores the complexities of immigration and identity.

His best-selling memoir Dear America: Notes of an Undocumented Citizen was published by HarperCollins in 2018, with an updated edition released in 2025. He has also produced acclaimed projects including Documented, an autobiographical documentary broadcast on CNN and Netflix, and What the Constitution Means to Me on Broadway, which was nominated for a Tony Award. Originally from the Philippines and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, Vargas continues to be a leading voice on immigration and racial equity in America.

@joseiswriting | @defineamerican

Live Reading

Ron (Ronnie) Butler is an actor, narrator, and coach with over 150 stage, television, and film credits, and nearly 500 audiobooks to his name. A multiple Earphones Award–winning narrator and multiple Audie Award nominee (the “Audies” are the audiobook industry’s equivalent of the Oscars), his work has been featured on annual “Best Of” lists across genres. He has taught acting at the Atlantic Theater Company Acting School (where he is a company member), AMDA, and Pace University, and he currently coaches with Narrator.Life.

Originally from the Bahamas and the son of the country’s most celebrated musician, Butler now makes his home in Palm Springs. He has just completed the first draft of his debut novel—one he naturally plans to narrate himself.

@ronniebutlerjr

This program is part of Q+ Art, a major initiative of Palm Springs Art Museum that centers on the work of artists who identify as LGBTQ+.

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