PUBLISHED: February 3, 2006
Africa is too large and diverse for generalizations. It has 54 nations, 5 time zones, at least 7 climates, more than 800 million people, and, according to the latest diligent research, maybe 14 million proverbs. This series of talks and readings seeks to present some fresh voices from all corners of Africa, in all their differences. Organized by the Virginia Quarterly Review, Granta, and Transition Magazine.
All events are free and open to the public.
SOUTHERN SWING
Wednesday, February 15th, 5:30 p.m.
College Park, MD: University of Maryland, David C. Driskell Center
Kwame Dawes & Binyavanga Wainaina
Thursday, February 16th, 6:30 p.m.
Fairfax, VA: George Mason University, Center for the Arts, Grand Tier
Kwame Dawes & Helon Habila
Friday, February 17th, 4:00 p.m.
Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia, UVa Bookstore
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie & Helon Habila
NORTHERN SWING
Tuesday, February 21st, 6:30 p.m.
New York, NY: Mercantile Library of New York, 17 East 47th Street
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Helon Habila & Binyavanga Wainaina
Thursday, February 23rd, 7:00 p.m.
New York, NY: New York University, 19 University Place
Adekeye Adebajo, Philip Alcabes, Daniel Bergner, John Ryle & Binyavanga Wainaina
Tuesday, February 28th, 7.00 pm
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, W.E.B. DuBois Institute
Brent Hayes Edwards, Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts & Binyavanga Wainaina
SPEAKERS
Adekeye Adebajo is the Executive Director of the Centre for Conflict Resolution in South Africa.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was born in Nigeria in 1977. Her first novel, Purple Hibiscus (Vintage), has been shortlisted for the Orange Fiction Prize and won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book. Her second novel, Half of a Yellow Sun is due out from Alfred A. Knopf in 2006. She now divides her time between Nigeria and the United States, where she is a Hodder fellow at Princeton University.
Philip Alcabes is an infectious-disease epidemiologist at Hunter College who has written extensively on the epidemiology of HIV/AIDS and other community-acquired infections. His work has appeared in the American Scholar, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Newsday and the Washington Post.
Kwame Dawes was born in Ghana in 1962 and grew up in Jamaica. He is Professor in English and Distinguished Poet in Residence at the University of South Carolina. Dawes has published eight collections of poetry, is an Honorary Fellow of the University of Iowa’s writing program.
Helon Habila was born in Nigeria in 1967. His debut novel, Waiting for an Angel (Norton), was awarded the Commonwealth Literature Prize for the Best First Novel by an African writer, and he won the Caine Prize in 2001. He is a contributing editor to the Virginia Quarterly Review, and currently the first Chinua Achebe Fellow in Global African Studies at Bard College.
Brent Hayes Edwards is professor of English and African American Studies at Rutgers University and a contributing editor at Transition. He is the author of The Practice of Diaspora.
Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts is a contributing editor at Transition. Her book Harlem Is Nowhere is forthcoming from Little, Brown.
John Ryle is Visiting Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Human Rights at Bard, Chair of the Rift Valley Institute, and author of Warriors of the White Nile.
Binyavanga Wainaina was born in Kenya in 1971. He moved to Cape Town, South Africa, where he worked as a freelance food and travel writer. He won Caine Prize in 2002. He lives in Nairobi, where he is the founding editor of Kwani?
