“Broken though it may be, America is ours, and together we can make this place anew, if we are finally honest with ourselves about the ugliness that has the country by the throat again.”
– Eddie Glaude, Time magazine, January 11, 2021.
Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own
In conversation with Derik Jalal Smith
Eddie Glaude is a leading public intellectual, Time magazine columnist, and author of numerous books including Democracy in Black: How Race Still Enslaves the American Soul, and In a Shade of Blue: Pragmatism and the Politics of Black America. The James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor and chair of the Department of African American Studies at Princeton, he graduated from Morehouse College where he served as Student Government President. His newest book is Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own, a New York Times bestseller that was named one of the “Ten Best Books of the Year” by the Chicago Tribune, and one of the “Best Books of the Year” by the Washington Post. “Begin Again is . . . filled with the type of passion, lyricism, and fire that James Baldwin commands and deserves…. This phenomenal work [is] a timeless and spellbinding conversation between two brilliant writers.”—Edwidge Danticat “[For] Americans seeking to understand our past, our present, and the possible futures before us, Begin Again challenges, illuminates, and points us toward, if not a more perfect union, at least a more just one.”—Jon Meacham In conversation with Derik Jalal Smith, Associate Professor of Literature at Claremont McKenna College and former Assistant Professor in the UAlbany English Department. He received the 2019 College Language Association Book Award for Robert Hayden In Verse: New Histories of African American Poetry and the Black Arts Era. This virtual event is cosponsored by Intercollegiate Department of Africana Studies at the Claremont Colleges and the Claremont McKenna College Literature Department. You may purchase Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own
at the local, independent Book House of Stuyvesant Plaza.