Yale Celebrates Life and Work of African-American Novelist Richard Wright

Renowned scholars and authors will discuss the legacy of writer Richard Wright at a centenary celebration taking place September 23, 4 to 6 p.m., at the Whitney Humanities Center, 53 Wall St.

Facsimile documents and photographs from the Richard Wright Papers at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library will also be on display during the celebration.

Wright (1908–1960) was a powerful voice for the African-American experience whose novels, short stories, and essays helped shape public discourse about race in the United States. Native Son (1940), his watershed narrative of race and class, holds a permanent place in the canon of 20th-century American literature.

The following writers and scholars will participate in the event.

Ishmael Reed is the author of nine novels, six books of poetry, four books of essays, and six plays. His latest book is Mixing It Up, Taking On the Media Bullies.

Novelist and literary critic Darryl Pinckney is the author of the acclaimed novels High Cotton and Sold and Gone, a study of African-American literary history. Pinckney has been awarded the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for fiction and the Harold D. Vursell Award for Distinguished Prose from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Award winning writer and playwright Caryl Phillips is a professor of English at Yale. His novels include The Final Passage, A State of Independence, The Nature of Blood, A Distant Shore, and Dancing in the Dark. Among his nonfiction works are The European Tribe, The Atlantic Sound, and A New World Order.

Yale historian Jonathan Holloway is the author of Confronting the Veil: Abram Harris Jr., E. Franklin Frazier, and Ralph Bunche, 1919–1941, the editor of Ralph Bunche’s A Brief and Tentative Analysis of Negro Leadership, and the coeditor of the anthology Black Scholars on the Line: Race, Social Science, and American Thought in the 20th Century. He is master of Calhoun, one of Yale’s 12 residential colleges.

Elizabeth Alexander is the author of several collections of poetry, including American Sublime (a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize), Antebellum Dream Book, Body of Life, and The Venus Hottentot. A volume of essays by Alexander, The Black Interior, was published by Graywolf in 2004. She teaches in the departments of African American Studies and English at Yale.

This event is free and open to the public, and co-sponsored by the departments of African American Studies and English, New Ideas in African American Studies, Calhoun College, the James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection at the Beinecke Library, and the Whitney Humanities Center. For more information, visit the Beinecke Library blog.