Behind the Book with Sidik Fofana: Stories from the Tenants Downstairs

BPL Presents is pleased to welcome Sidik Fofana to DeKalb Library for a workshop and reading based on .

After a reading and presentation by Fofana about his writing journey, attendees will be guided through a writing workshop with the opportunity of sharing their work. All experience levels welcome!

At Banneker Terrace, everybody knows everybody, or at least knows of them. Longtime tenants’ lives are entangled together in the ups and downs of the day-to-day, for better or for worse. The neighbors in the unit next door are friends or family, childhood rivals or enterprising business partners. In other words, Harlem is home. But the rent is due, and the clock of gentrification—never far from anyone’s mind—is ticking louder now than ever.
In eight interconnected stories, Sidik Fofana conjures a residential community under pressure. There is Swan, in apartment 6B, whose excitement about his friend’s release from Pr*son jeopardizes the life he’s been trying to lead. Mimi, in apartment 14D, hustles to raise the child she had with Swan, waitressing at Roscoe’s and doing hair on the side. And Quanneisha B. Miles, in apartment 21J, is a former gymnast with a good education who wishes she could leave Banneker for good, but can’t seem to escape the building’s gravitational pull. We root for the tight-knit cast of characters as they weave in and out of one another’s narratives, working to escape their pasts and blaze new paths forward for themselves and the people they love. All the while we brace, as they do, for the challenges of a rapidly shifting future.

PARTICIPANT

Sidik Fofana is a public school teacher in Brooklyn and graduate of NYU’s MFA Creative Writing program. He is a recipient of the 2023 Whiting Award and was also named an Emerging Writer Fellow at the Center for Fiction in 2018. His work has appeared in the Sewanee Review and Granta. He is the author of Stories from the Tenants Downstairs, published by Scribner in 2022.

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Host or Publisher Brooklyn Public Library - DeKalb