Baldwin: A Love Story
< All Events
Where |
Annenberg Theater
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|---|---|
When |
September 27, 2:00 - 3:00pm |
Where |
Annenberg Theater
|
|---|---|
When |
September 27, 2:00 - 3:00pm |
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.
About the book
Drawing on new archival material, original research, and interviews, this spellbinding book is the first major biography of James Baldwin in three decades, revealing how profoundly his personal relationships shaped his life and work.
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.
Nicholas Boggs shows how Baldwin drew on all the complex forces within these relationships—geographical, cultural, political, artistic, and erotic— and alchemized them into novels, essays, and plays that speak truth to power and had an indelible impact on the civil rights movement and on Black and queer literary history. Richly immersive, Baldwin: A Love Story follows the writer’s creative journey between Harlem, Paris, Switzerland, the southern United States, Istanbul, Africa, the South of France, and beyond. In so doing, it magnifies our understanding of the public and private lives of one of the major literary figures of the twentieth century, whose contributions only continue to grow in influence.
Nicholas Boggs and the cover of 'Baldwin: A Love Story'.
Credit : Rachel Eliza Griffiths; Design by Rodrigo Corral/Photo by David Gahr
