Join us on Festival Day, Saturday, May 7, at 12 p.m. (EST) as we welcome Pulitzer Prize Finalist and New York Times bestselling author and poet Elizabeth Alexander. Elizabeth will be live and in-person talking about her new book, The Trayvon Generation, with feminist activist, author, and scholar Salamishah Tillet.

Originally published as an essay in the New Yorker, The Trayvon Generation expands on Alexander’s meditation about the power of art and culture to illuminate America’s unresolved problem with race.

Tickets to hear Elizabeth Alexander in-person cost $30 and include a copy of the book The Trayvon Generation (value $22). Elizabeth will be signing books after the talk.  Tickets can be bought here.

Books can be picked up from Festival partner Watchung booksellers . They will also be available for collection at the event.

This event will be held in The Sanctuary, inside the First Congregational Church, 40 S Fullerton Ave, Montclair. We will follow all Covid-19 safety protocols required by the CDC at the time of the event.

Elizabeth Alexander is a prize-winning and New York Times bestselling author, renowned poet, educator, scholar, and cultural advocate.  Her most recent book, The Trayvon Generation (2022), is a galvanizing meditation on the power of art and culture to illuminate America’s unresolved problem with race and the challenges facing young Black America.  Among the fifteen books she has authored or co-authored, her memoir, The Light of the World, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Biography and the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2015, and her poetry collection American Sublime was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry in 2006.  Notably, Dr. Alexander composed and recited “Praise Song for the Day” for President Barack Obama’s 2009 inauguration.  Over the course of an esteemed career in education, she has held distinguished professorships at Smith College, Columbia University, and Yale University, where she taught for 15 years and chaired the African American Studies Department.  Dr. Alexander is currently president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the nation’s largest funder in the arts, culture, and humanities.

Salamishah Tillet is the Henry Rutgers Professor of African American and African Studies and Creative Writing at Rutgers University – Newark.  She is the Director of Express Newark, a center for socially engaged art and design as well as a contributing critic-at-large for The New York Times.  She is the author of In Search of the Color Purple: The Story of an American Masterpiece,  and Sites of Slavery: Citizenship and Racial Democracy in the Post-Civil Rights Imagination. In 2020, she was awarded the Whiting Foundation Creative Nonfiction Grant for her forthcoming book, All the Rage: Nina Simone and The World She Made.

This event is part of Succeed2gether’s Montclair Literary Festival.

Any proceeds from the festival benefit parent organization, Montclair-based non-profit Succeed2gether, which offers after-school one-on-one tutoring and enrichment classes with the aim of closing the education and opportunity gaps in Essex County, NJ. You can read more about Succeed2gether and the festival at www.succeed2gether.org.

The festival organizing committee wishes to thank its event partners, festival sponsors, and community members.