Damon Galgut, Andre Holland And More Announced for March Literary Events At 92Y

March literary events have been announced at 92Y. Events will presented both in person and online.

Get full details here:

playing othello

With Andre Holland, Chukwudi Iwuji and John Douglas Thompson

In Person and Online

Monday, March 7, 7:30 pm, From $20

That's he that was Othello. Here I am. Three acclaimed actors who have recently starred as Shakespeare's Othello -André Holland (at Shakespeare's Globe), Chukwudi Iwuji (at The Public Theater) and John Douglas Thompson (at Theatre for a New Audience)-discuss the challenges they faced in playing the role and read key speeches from the play. Their conversation will be moderated by James Shapiro and Ayanna Thompson, Shakespeare Scholars in Residence at The Public Theater. The evening will open with a musical selection from Duke Ellington's 1957 tribute to Shakespeare, Such Sweet Thunder.

This event is part of Columbia University's Such Sweet Thunder: Ellington Plays Shakespeare-Love and Power in Adaptation, a year-long series of public events across the arts inspired by the resonances and dissonances between Shakespeare and Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn's Such Sweet Thunder.

damon galgut: the promise

with vanity fair's anderson tepper

In Person and Online

Wednesday, March 16, 7:30 PM, From $20

But when the words are said to her aloud, she doesn't believe them. She closes her eyes and shakes her head. No, no. It can't be true...Damon Galgut, in his first 92Y appearance, discusses and reads from his latest novel, The Promise, winner of the 2021 Booker Prize. "This remarkable new novel suggests that the demands of history and the answering cry of the novel can still powerfully converge," wrote James Wood. "It most closely resembles the work of predecessors like Woolf and Faulkner."

a tree grows in brooklyn:

the enduring importance of an iconic novel

Online Course

Thursday, March 24 and Thursday, March 31, 3 pm, From $65

Betty Smith's debut novel, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn , sold nearly three million copies in the two years after its publication in 1943. As an Armed Forces Edition, it was much in demand among U.S. soldiers during World War II; since then, it has been translated into sixteen languages, adapted as a movie and a Broadway musical, and has never gone out of print. Oprah Winfrey identifies it as "the book that moved me most when I was growing up," and the New York Public Library classes it as one of the "Books of the Century." Yet the novel is seldom considered by critics or scholars as a serious literary experience.Joyce Zonana, Brooklyn-bred Professor of Literature emerita at the City University of New York, will take a new look at this neglected yet beloved classic that has reflected and shaped generations of readers.

erica hunt and solmaz sharif

In Person and Online

Monday, March 28, 7:30 PM, From $15

Erica Hunt's latest book of poetry is Jump the Clock: New and Selected Poems-"an invaluable gathering of the pioneering poet's oeuvre, and a treasure of lyric and analytic revelations and delights," wrote John Keene. "Hunt expands poetry's range and power and shows how to make the illegible legible." Solmaz Sharif's new collection is Customs . "Solmaz Sharif's poems marry an exquisite lyric sensibility to a profound social conscience, and in so doing they urge a renewed sensitivity to the private costs of public conflict," wrote Tracy K. Smith. "They are also beautifully and inventively crafted, never letting readers forget that what is at stake begins in language."

toni morrison's the black book

A talk by saidiya hartman

In Person and Online

Thursday, March 31, 7:30 PM, From $35

As the final event in 92Y's year-long series on the works of Toni Morrison, scholar Saidiya Hartman (Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments) discusses a work that Morrison co-edited, The Black Book, a landmark compendium of words and images documenting the Black experience in America. "The Black Book is an incredible testament to the strength, character, and endurance of a people," wrote Cornel West. "Especially in these historic times, I can think of no better way to celebrate African American achievement than through a retrospective look at our history-painful and pleasurable. This is a book no American-black or white-can afford to ignore."