Toni Morrison's Radical Attentions with Prof. Namwali Serpell

Join us for a close look at on of Morrison's essays with novelist, critic, and scholar Prof. Namwali Serpell. Toni Morrison's contributions to literature and American culture are a case study in the powers of human attention: to the possibilities of language, to the complexity of love, and to the pain and beauty of our American inheritance. In this evening of close reading and discussion, we'll take a close look at one of Morrison's essays with novelist, critic, and scholar Prof. Namwali Serpell, author of On Morrison (Hogarth 2026). The close reading will be followed by a Q&A with Prof. Serpell on Morrison's work as a whole. Namwali Serpell is a writer and a Professor of English at Harvard. She’s the author of three works of criticism, Seven Modes of Uncertainty (2014), Stranger Faces (2020), and On Morrison (2026), and two novels: The Old Drift (2019) and The Furrows (2022). She was born in Lusaka and she lives in New York City. PASSAGES: On Morrison podcast. Photo credit: Toni Morrison in her office at Random House (Jill Krementz)