Event Lectures and Symposia Race in America: Colson Whitehead

Date and Location

  • When: Thursday, July 16, 2020

    7:00 pm - 8:00 pm EDT

  • This event will be livestreamed on Facebook External and YouTube External. It will be available for viewing afterwards in the Library's Event Videos collection.

  • Where: Online Only

Part of National Book Festival

Request ADA accommodations five business days in advance at (202) 707-6362 or ADA@loc.gov.

Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden talks to two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and National Book Festival veteran (2009, 2012, 2016 and this year) Colson Whitehead about the need for stories from our past to help us contend with the present—especially at moments of great change.

This event is part of the National Book Festival Presents series “Hear You, Hear Me.” The series is named for a phrase from the Langston Hughes poem “Theme for English B”:

But I guess I’m what
I feel and see and hear, Harlem, I hear you.
hear you, hear me—we two—you, me, talk on this page.

This new online series, a continuation of the themes raised in our June 5 program, “Carla Hayden and Lonnie Bunch: Cultural Institutions at Times of Social Unrest,” features Hayden in conversation with some of the nation’s great literary figures. These conversations will highlight what poetry and literature can offer the nation as it contends with foundational issues of social justice.