Namwali Serpell in conversation with Saeed Jones

More about the speakers

Namwali Serpell is a Zambian writer who teaches at the University of California, Berkeley. Her first novel, The Old Drift (Hogarth, 2019), was featured in best-of-the-year lists by the New York Times Book Review, Time, the Atlantic, NPR, and Buzzfeed, among others. She received a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award for women writers in 2011 and was selected for the Africa39, a Hay Festival project identifying the best African writers under the age of 40. Serpell’s essays, stories, and reviews have appeared in the Believer, McSweeney’s, n+1, New York Times, New Yorker, New York Review of Books, Tin House, Triple Canopy, Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Guardian, among other publications.

Saeed Jones is the author of How We Fight for Our Lives: A Memoir (Simon & Schuster), winner of the 2019 Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction and the 2020 Stonewall Book Award/Israel Fishman Non-Fiction Award, as well as the poetry collection Prelude to Bruise, winner of the 2015 PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry and the 2015 Stonewall Book Award/Barbara Gittings Literature Award. The poetry collection was also a finalist for the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award, as well as awards from Lambda Literary and the Publishing Triangle in 2015. He lives in Columbus, Ohio, and tweets @TheFerocity.