Sarah Ladipo Manyika in conversation with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., 'Between Starshine and Clay: Conversations from the African Diaspora'

A book talk with Sarah Ladipo Manyika (Author) & Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

Livestream at youtube.com/hutchinscenter

Publishing in time for Black History Month, this is a ground-breaking collection of conversations with the most distinguished black thinkers of our times, including Michelle Obama, Toni Morrison, Claudia Rankine, and Wole Soyinka, on race, decolonization, systemic inequalities, and the climate crisis.

Award-winning author and cultural critic Sarah Ladipo Manyika takes the reader on a remarkable journey across contemporary cultural and political landscapes as she talks to some of the most distinguished black thinkers of our times, including Nobel Laureates Toni Morrison and Wole Soyinka, and civic leaders first lady Michelle Obama and Senator Cory Booker.

We meet activists, artists and intellectuals who have been deeply involved in shaping the gripping debates of public discourse. With grace and energy, Manyika searches for truth with poet Claudia Rankine and historian Henry Louis Gates Jr., who leads the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University (the world's largest such center). She discusses race and gender with South African filmmaker Xoliswa Sithole and American actor Anna Deavere Smith. She interrogates the world around us with parliamentarian Lord Michael Hastings and civil-rights activist Pastor Evan Mawarire, who dared to take on President Robert Mugabe and lived to tell the tale.

In journeys that book-end the collection, Manyika reflects on her own experience of being seen as white in Nigeria, African in England, Arab in France, colored in South Africa and black in America, while feeling the least black and most human among her fellow travelers, explorers all, against the sharp white relief of the South Pole.

Sarah Ladipo Manyika is a British-Nigerian-American writer of novels, short stories and essays translated into several languages. She is author of the best-selling novel In Dependence (2009) and multiple shortlisted novel Like A Mule Bringing Ice Cream To The Sun (2016), and has had work published in publications including The Washington Post, LA Review of Books, The Guardian, and Agni, among others. Sarah serves as Board Chair for the women's writing residency, Hedgebrook; she was previously Board Director for the Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco; and has been a judge for the Goldsmiths Prize, California Book Awards, Aspen Words Literary Prize, and Chair of judges for the Pan-African Etisalat Prize.