Class in the Black Community: Margo Jefferson, Angela Flournoy, and Marcus Guillory
Monday, March 6th, 2017 | 7:30 PM
Purchase a single ticket for $15
Folger Shakespeare Library
201 East Capitol St., SE
Washington, DC 20003 (map)
Margo Jefferson’s memoir Negroland is a meditation on race, sex, and American culture through the privileged prism of Chicago’s Black elite. Angela Flournoy’s novel The Turner House tells a multi-generational saga through the decline of Detroit’s East Side. Marcus Guillory’s Red Now and Laters gives us a coming-of-age story set in the Creole and cowboy-infused East Texas of the 1980s. These authors write on race and class, privilege and oppression and offer stories—both funny and heartbreaking—that are caught at the intersection.
Join us on at the Folger Theatre on Monday, March 6th, for this important and wide-ranging conversation.
Margo Jefferson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning cultural critic. She has been a staff writer for The New York Times and Newsweek; her reviews and essays have appeared in New York Magazine, Grand Street, Vogue, Harper’s and many other publications. Her book, On Michael Jackson, was published in 2006. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Rockefeller Foundation/Theater Communications Group grant. She has also written and performed two theater pieces at The Cherry Lane Theatre and The Culture Project.
“Jefferson’s candor, and the courage and rigor of her critic’s mind, recall a number of America’s greatest thinkers on race.”
-Tracy K. Smith, The New York Times
Angela Flournoy is the author of The Turner House, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and a New York Times notable book of the year. The novel was also a finalist for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction and an NAACP Image Award. She is a National Book Foundation “5 Under 35” Honoree for 2015. Her fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, and she has written for The New York Times, The New Republic, The Los Angeles Times, and elsewhere.
“An elegant and assured debut.”
–Stacia L. Brown, The Washington Post
Marcus J. Guillory, Houston-born, Los Angeles-based, writer/producer, has worked as a screenwriter for over 10 years and is the first American to have written and produced a Bollywood film. Under the moniker “Mateo Senolia”, Guillory has recently teamed up with LA radio icon/tastemaker Garth Trinidad (89.9 KCRW) to create a fusion of spoken literature and house music called “Lit House” with the intent of introducing non-readers to literature with an upcoming EP “Postcards From Strangers” on house legend Osunlade’s Yoruba Records. His shorts stories and magazine articles can be found on the web and onf newsstands.
“Guillory’s story provides insights—simultaneously provocative, angry, and compassionate—into one of America’s neglected communities.”
–Publishers Weekly