About leaving his native country, James Baldwin argues, “One sees it better from a distance…from another place, from another country.” Can displacement (voluntary or otherwise) bring a writer to write more clearly about her “home” or herself? Is the tension between Baldwin and the places about which he writes, the complications between himself and those places, a necessary component to his success? The panelists discuss the ways in which Baldwin’s view of place informed his work.

With Dante Micheaux , Darryl Pickney and Tiphanie Yanique, moderated by Tracyann Williams, faculty, School of Undergraduate Studies.

[Tiphanie Yanique was not able to attend.]

Participant Bios

Dante Micheaux is the author of Amorous Shepherd (Sheep Meadow Press, 2010). His poems and translations have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Bloom, Callaloo, Gathering Ground and Rattapallax— among other journals and anthologies. He has been a guest of the Poetry Project and the Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine. His honors include a prize in poetry from the Vera List Center for Art and Politics, the Oscar Wilde Award and fellowships from Cave Canem Foundation and The New York Times Foundation. He resides in London and New York City.

Darryl Pinckney, a longtime contributor to The New York Review of Books, is the author of a novel, High Cotton, and, in the Alain Locke Lecture Series, Out There: Mavericks of Black Literature. His new book is Blackballed: The Black Vote and US Democracy.

Tiphanie Yanique is the author of the novel Land of Love and Drowning, Riverhead/Penguin 2014), and the short story collection, How to Escape from a Leper Colony, published by Graywolf Press, 2010. BookPage listed her as one of the 14 Women to watch out for in 2014. Her writing has won the 2011 BOCAS Prize for Caribbean Fiction, Boston Review Prize in Fiction, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers Award, a Pushcart Prize, a Fulbright Scholarship, an Academy of American Poet’s Prize and most recently the 2014 Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize. She has been listed by the Boston Globe as one of the sixteen cultural figures to watch out for and by the National Book Foundation as one of the 5 Under 35. Her writing has been published in Best African American Fiction, The Wall Street Journal, American Short Fiction among others.

Tracyann Williams earned her Ph. D. and M. Phil. in English from The Graduate Center/CUNY. Before becoming the Director of Academic Advising, she was faculty in the School of Undergraduate Studies for 13 years. She has also taught Composition and Literature at LaGuardia College/CUNY. Her current research focuses on mixed race women in modern fictions, a topic that influences the courses she offers in literature, gender studies, and cultural studies. Her courses include Gender and Popular Culture, The Harlem Renaissance, and Passing: (Re)Constructing Identity. She has received numerous awards and recognition for her research and teaching including a Helena Rubenstein Foundation fellowship and the Distinguished University Teaching Award from The New School in 2004.

This event is part of the year-long, city-wide celebration The Year of James Baldwin, which is presented in partnership with Harlem Stage, Columbia University School of the Arts and New York Live Arts, and in collaboration with the Vera List Center for Art and Politics, the School of Media Studies, and the School of Writing from The New School.