Charles P. Stevenson Jr. Library  4:00 pm – 6:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Please join us for a reception to celebrate journalist Alvin Patrick's exhibit of selected first editions and rare books from his private collection. This exhibit, Faces of the Struggle: Frontispiece Portraits in African American Literature (1834 to 1949), features the portraits of some of the greatest civil rights activists of the 19th and 20th centuries including, Solomon Northup, Frederick Douglass, Phillis Wheatley, and Gwendolyn Brooks. 


Download: APatrick-digital.pdf

A Lecture by ilija Trojanow
Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium  5:30 pm – 7:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
"Each day we are sold different versions of yesterday, but rarely offered a different tomorrow. The apocalypse streams into every household at a flat rate. In an era of dystopian forebodings, the future can no longer be taken for granted, and optimism is under siege. It seems high time for a reboot of utopian literature, in which a space that is not, may yet come to be in the future. We are near forgetting that history is not a foregone conclusion, and that fatalism is the last refuge of the coward. How we shape the future lies in our own hands, but with the prerequisite that we are ready to think ahead, into the unknown and uncertain, imagining alternatives to given paradigms. If the seeds of human progress are indeed planted by ideas before they can blossom into transformations, utopian narratives are of existential importance." Our guest, Ilija Trojanow, has spent the past  several years working on a utopian novel and exploring the history of Utopia. At a time when we reckon with our destruction of the natural world and of imagination, Trojanow's work encourages us to scrub clear our overclouded skies and to ask ourselves: what is literature if not unshackled fancy?

Campus Center, Weis Cinema  5:30 pm – 7:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
This event brings together in person on the Bard campus in Annandale three esteemed writers—Nuruddin Farah, Ilija Trojanow, and Aleksandar Hemon—to read from and discuss their work. As suggested by the titles North of Dawn (Farah) and Nowhere Man (Hemon), all three writers are concerned in their work with questions of place and displacement, of cultural difference and shared humanity, and of what Trojanow in his recent work calls “utopian narratives.” Each also has deep personal and professional connections to more than one language, and together they comprise a knowledge of literatures that is truly stunning in its diversity, including works composed in Arabic, Bulgarian, German, Serbo-Croation, and Somali, among other languages. All three authors are also active in a plurality of genres and media, which taken together includes novels, short stories, criticism, plays, film and television scripts, and music. On this evening, they will read and discuss their work and explore common concerns and points of difference, and will invite the audience to join in the conversation