Festival Albertine
In an interview with The New York Times about the upcoming Festival Albertine, Ta-Nehisi Coates mentioned faculty member Maboula Soumahoro's work and called her "really brilliant." Soumahoro will speak at the Festival on Saturday, November 5 at 5:00 PM.
In his interview, Coates, who has organized this year's festival, mentioned meeting Soumahoro in Paris. He said: "Maboula Soumahoro [a scholar who has tried to establish an offshoot of Black History Month in France] is someone else who is going to be really brilliant. When I came to these people, I felt like a 5-year-old, with all my dumb and silly questions."
At Festival Albertine, Soumahoro will speak in conversation with Laurent Dubois, Darryl Pinckney and Scholastique Mukasonga, about "Europe and America in the Black Literary imagination." They will explore "this mutual fascination and ponder how it has impacted their own work and influenced literature more broadly."
According to a post on Albertine bookstore's blog, "the Festival will explore the changing nature of identity and how the arts interrogate our national, social, and cultural labels today in France and the US."
Other speakers include Claudia Rankine, whose poetry collection Citizen won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry in 2015.
More information about the festival, including a link to the livestream.