Edna Bonhomme in Conversation with Emilia Roig

Edna Bonhomme is a dear friend of Chapters, and it's a wonderful occasion for us to host the launch of her new memoir, Tending to Our Wounds.

The book moves through Berlin, New York, Cairo, Harlem, Port-au-Prince and Miami, finding in each city another layer of the same inheritance: what colonialism and racial capitalism leave in the body, and what it takes to carry that history without being flattened by it. Robin D.G. Kelley calls it an accounting of what it cost Africans throughout the diaspora to enrich a European ruling class, and Sophie Lewis describes it as memoir, history and politics braided together with rare fluidity. We think it's one of the most necessary books of the year.

Edna is a historian of science, critic and journalist who has called Berlin home since 2017. Her first book, A History of the World in Six Plagues, was shortlisted for Best Science Book in Austria and praised for exposing how deeply Western medicine is entangled with colonialism and capitalism. Her essays appear in the Atlantic, the Guardian and the London Review of Books, among others, and Tending to Our Wounds is her second book, and her most personal.

She'll be joined in conversation by Emilia Roig, founder of the Berlin-based Center for Intersectional Justice and author of the bestselling Why We Matter: Das Ende der Unterdrückung (Why We Matter: The End of Oppression), which traced the intersections of racism, homophobia and patriarchy through her own family history and became one of the defining German nonfiction books of its year. Roig has spent the years since teaching intersectionality and critical race theory across Europe and the US, and her work on love, marriage and liberation in Das Ende der Ehe: Für eine Revolution der Liebe (The End of Marriage: For a Revolution of Love) makes her exactly the right interlocutor for a book so concerned with what healing actually requires.

We know what's trending, but we also know where it came from, and this conversation sits right at that intersection: two Berlin-based thinkers, two bodies of work in close conversation with each other, one evening to sit with all of it together.

Copies of Tending to Our Wounds as well as all of Edna and Emilia Roig's books will be available on the night, with both authors signing after the conversation.