The New Yorker Festival Preview: The Matter of Black Lives – The New Yorker

Last month, The New Yorker published The Matter of Black Lives, an anthology of the magazines writings on race and the Black American experience. Drawing from decades of reporting, cultural criticism, profiles, and memoir, the collection ranges widely, spanning vivid dispatches from the civil-rights movement, detailed portraits of pivotal artists and thinkers, and powerful reflections on the troubled past and turbulent present. The contributors comprise a pantheon, including James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Stanley Crouch, Calvin Trillin, Elizabeth Alexander, Hilton Als, Zadie Smith, and more.

On Sunday, three of the writers featured in the bookJelani Cobb, Jamaica Kincaid, and Charlayne Hunter-Gaultwill gather virtually at The New Yorker Festival, the magazines weeklong celebration of politics and culture, to consider the state of race now and in the future. Cobb, a staff writer who wrote the foreword to The Matter of Black Lives and co-edited the volume with David Remnick, the magazines editor, will moderate the discussion. A professor at Columbia Journalism School, Cobb will share insights from his extensive reporting and commentary on Black life in America, which has included an analysis of the killing of George Floyd, a profile of Stacey Abrams, and a consideration of Africa as portrayed in the movie Black Panther. (In addition to his foreword, three of Cobbs pieces for the magazine are featured in The Matter of Black Lives.)

Kincaid, a novelist and professor of African and African American studies at Harvard, has contributed to The New Yorker since 1974, beginning with a piece, co-written by George W. S. Trow, about the West Indian American Day Carnival, in Brooklyn, which traces its origins to the era of slavery in Trinidad. A prolific contributor of fiction and Talk of the Town pieces in particular, Kincaid appears in The Matter of Black Lives with a recollection of a formative period of her youth spent in New York.

Hunter-Gault published her first piece in The New Yorker in 1967, and in the intervening decades has written for the magazine about racial politics in South Africa and at home, including her meeting in Atlanta, as a young reporter, with Martin Luther King, Jr. Her contribution to The Matter of Black Lives recounts Columbia Universitys belated recognition of Langston Hughes, who produced many of his poetic masterpieces in Harlem, just blocks from the school.

Those viewing the conversation live will be invited to submit questions, and a recording will be accessible for streaming until November 10th. Tickets are available to all, and discounted for those who subscribe.

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The New Yorker Festival Preview: The Matter of Black Lives - The New Yorker