Tuesday, November 19
7:00pm
Griffin Hall, Room 3
Please join Africana Studies and the Department of English in welcoming award-winning author Aminatta Forna for a book reading and conversation about her novel, The Hired Man, based in Croatia where she examines the questions that plague a community after a period of civil strife. The Boston Globe has run the first mainstream press US review of The Hired Man here.
The reading will be preceded by a selection of Balkan “Kola” music chosen by Lysander Jaffe ’14. Professor Forna’s books will be available for sale and refreshments will be served. All are welcome!
Aminatta Forna was born in Scotland, raised in both Sierra Leone and Britain and spent periods of her childhood in Iran, Thailand and Zambia. She is a Professor of Creative Writing at Bath Spa University but is currently visiting Williams College as the 2013 Sterling Brown Distinguished Visiting Professor. Forna is the award winning author of the novels The Memory of Love (an award winning novel that elucidates the costs and damages of civil war in West Africa in the 1990?s), The Devil That Danced on Water (about her dissident father and Sierra Leone) and Ancestor Stones (a novel about the lives of four women, a plantation, and change in Africa). Described as one of Africa’s most promising new writers, Forna is also an activist, someone who has helped build a school in her native Rogbonko and who works to promote the arts and culture of Africa widely in both television and print media.
Africana Studies is proud to welcome Aminatta Forna again, returning as our 2013 Sterling Brown Visiting Professor. She will be teaching AFR 205/ENGL269, Introduction to African Literature: Witness Literature, this Fall 2013.
