Freedom: Essays with author Zinzi Clemmons and Faith Adiele

Join us for Freedom: Essays with author Zinzi Clemmons and Faith Adiele - co-presented with Litquake & MoAD.
About this Event

Join Zinzi Clemmons in conversation with Faith Adiele on Clemmons' latest essay collection, Freedom, a radically vulnerable and virtuosic inquiry into the pursuit of freedom and the interminable nature of struggle. Co-presented by , San Francisco's Literary Festival and .

Weaving personal reflections with piercing insight and expansive vision across nine brilliant essays, Zinzi Clemmons explores the complexities of the elusive concept of freedom. In a deft mix of memoir, family history, criticism, and reportage, drawing on a vast range of material from Joan Didion to James Baldwin, political analysis and history to Clemmons’s own experiences across the globe, Freedom is an incendiary exploration of race, sex, class, and inheritance. In elegiac prose, Clemmons trains her discerning eye on American institutions and mythologies, probing the bounds of liberation and autonomy to interrogate our most enduring quest—the relentless pursuit of freedom for all.

"[U]ndeniably one of the greatest stories of a bygone era." - Wall Street Journal

About the Speakers

Zinzi Clemmons was raised in Philadelphia by a South African mother and an American father. Her debut novel, What We Lose (Viking 2017), was named “Debut Novel of the Year” by Vogue, and received praise from the Atlantic, the Guardian, the New York Times, The New Yorker, and others. What We Lose was a finalist for the Aspen Words Literary Prize, the California Book Award, a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Leonard Prize. It was longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize, and the International Dublin Literary Award. She is a 2017 National Book Award 5 Under 35 Honoree. She wrote the foreword to a new edition of Jean Toomer’s Cane, published by Penguin Classics in 2019. She serves as Director of Creative Writing at The University of California, Davis.

is an award-winning writer and professor. Adiele’s two memoirs are The Nigerian-Nordic Girl’s Guide to Lady Problems and Meeting Faith: The Thai Forest Journals of a Black Buddhist Nun, an account of ordaining as Thailand’s first Black Buddhist nun that won the PEN Open Book Award. Her media credits include two episodes of recent HBO-Max series A World of Calm, Sleep Stories for the Calm app and the PBS documentary My Journey Home, about finding her father and siblings in Nigeria. Adiele is co-editor of Coming of Age Around the World: A Multicultural Anthology. Her essays appear in such periodicals as O: The Oprah Magazine, Essence, Transition, The Rumpus, and Huffington Post. Adiele is Associate Professor of Creative Nonfiction at California College of the Arts and core faculty at Stonecoast Low-Residency MFA Program and VONA Workshops for Writers of Color. She lives with her husband in the Bay Area, where she is co-host/co-founder of African Book Club at San Francisco’s Museum of the African Diaspora; BIPOC Writing Party, a weekly response to the pandemic; and Traveling while BIPOC, the nation’s first writing workshop for travelers of color.