- NYS Writers Institute
Albany Book Festival spotlight: Farah Jasmine Griffin and Janell Hobson
We'll use this space to introduce you to featured writers coming to our 4th Annual Albany Book Festival, scheduled for Saturday, September 25, at the University at Albany.
Farah Jasmine Griffin and Janell Hobson
Farah Jasmine Griffin, a professor who teaches African American literature at Columbia University, has published widely on issues of race and gender, feminism, jazz and cultural politics. Her new book, Read Until You Understand: The Profound Wisdom of Black Life and Literature, will be published in mid-September.
Her other books include If You Can’t Be Free, Be a Mystery: In Search of Billie Holiday;Harlem Nocturne: Women Artists and Progressive Politics During World War II, and with co-author Salim Washington, Clawing At the Limits of Cool: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and the Greatest Jazz Collaboration Ever.
Janell Hobson is chair of the University at Albany's Department of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.
She recently edited The Routledge Companion to Black Women’s Cultural Histories and is the author of Venus in the Dark: Blackness and Beauty in Popular Culture and Body as Evidence: Mediating Race, Globalizing Gender, and the forthcoming When God Lost Her Tongue: Historical Consciousness and the Black Feminist Imagination.
She also writes and blogs for Ms. Magazine and authored several cover stories for the magazine, including "Beyoncé’s Fierce Feminism” in the Spring 2013 edition.
Schedule information for the Farah Jasmine Griffin and Janell Hobson conversation will be updated at https://www.albanybookfestival.com/
The books
The books of Farah Jasmine Griffin's and Janell Hobson are available at the local, independent Book House of Stuyvesant Plaza. Here are links to their catalog: https://www.bhny.com/search/author/%22Griffin%2C%20Farah%20Jasmine%22
https://www.bhny.com/search/site/Janell%20Hobson
More links
Visit Farah Jasmine Griffin's website at https://afamstudies.columbia.edu/content/farah-jasmine-griffin
and find her on social media at twitter.com/FJasmineG | www.instagram.com/fjasmine23/ | www.facebook.com/fjgriffin
You can find Janell Hobson at janellhobson.com/ | twitter.com/JProfessor | facebook.com/janell.hobson
Griffin was interviewed on NPR on September 23, 2020
About the Albany Book Festival
The fourth annual event, on Saturday, Sept. 25, at the University at Albany, will be held in-person for the first time since 2019. Events will begin at 10:30 a.m. and conclude at 5 p.m. All events are free and open to the public. More information at www.albanybookfestival.com
The list of Albany Book Festival guests includes (subject to change):
Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah (Friday Black: Stories),
Ayad Akhtar (Homeland Elegies),
Robert Boyers (The Tyranny of Virtue: Identity, The Academy, and the Hunt for Political Heresies),
Elizabeth Brundage (The Vanishing Point),
Mary Gaitskill (This is Pleasure),
Garth Greenwell (Cleanness),
Farah Jasmine Griffin (Read Until You Understand: The Profound Wisdom of Black Life and Literature),
Janell Hobson (When God Lost Her Tongue: Historical Consciousness and the Black Feminist Imagination),
Quiara Alegría Hudes (My Broken Language: A Memoir, co-wrote the Tony Award-winning stage musical "In the Heights" with Lin-Manuel Miranda.),
Amitava Kumar (A Time Outside This Time),
Reif Larsen (Uma Wimple Charts her House),
Emily Layden (All Girls),
Ed Lin (David Tung Can’t Have a Girlfriend Until He Gets Into an Ivy League College),
George Makari (Of Fear and Strangers: A History of Xenophobia),
Bethany C. Morrow (So Many Beginnings: A Little Women Remix),
Peter Osnos (An Especially Good View: Watching History Happen),
Jay Parini (Borges and Me: An Encounter),
David Pietrusza (Too Long Ago: A Childhood Memoir. A Vanished World.),
Nathaniel Philbrick (Travels with George: In Search of Washington and His Legacy),
David Rohde (In Deep: The FBI, the CIA, and the Truth about America’s “Deep State”),