Please silence your cell phones if you would. In terms of books which i know you all want to make sure you get the books you are going to be hearing about this morning outside the Capitol Building on mississippi st. There are number of sellers who will have looks and adjacent to the industry as the signing tent. In the back page of your brochure you will see this fantastic schedule. Authors will not necessarily be on immediately after the panel so just check the other name and the time in the brochure. We are delighted to have cspan broadcasting live this morning so welcome to jackson. The panel will also be shown on october so if you want to review it again. Thank you for the state legislature for the use of this facility today and i want to thank the authors and the moderators for being here with us this morning. The first panel is sponsored by the university of southern mississippi friends of the University Library so we are grateful for their support and now i will introduce jesmyn ward who is our panel moderator. She received her b. A. And m. A. From Stanford University and an msa from the university of michigan. She serves as the jon Renee Grisham writer residents of the University Mississippi and shes the author of the novels where the line bleeds and salvage the bonds which won the 2011th National Book award for fiction and shes author of the memoir amend the and the editor of the new book just out this month, the fire of this time. She is currently at work on her third novel and she lives in mississippi so welcome. Thank you. [applause] im really happy to be here and im happy with the turnout. I think this is one of the biggest crowds i have ever seen on a panel that i have done so thats great. Welcome to the mississippi book festival and in particular this panel. Im going to tell you about the collection first and then introduced the panelists and then we will get started with questions. I conceived of the fire of this time in the wake of Travon Martins death. That was the year in which i scrolled through twitter and endless pieces of on line journalism and then still desperate for conversation finally turned to James Baldwin, sharp truly honest baldwin. In the fire of this time an essay on religion i found a voice that affirmed my words might die in my despair that from so many years ago encouraged me to keep trudging forward. With the essayist and poets of this time i hoped to create such a document for a new generation, a book together and preserve new voices to reckon with the anger in love at war on americas streets and to serve as a jury and witness. Here with me today are four of my fellow contributors, Garnette Cadogan honoree jeffers kima jones and kiese laymon. Garnette cadogan is the editoratlarge of nonstop metropolis in new york city at less a visiting fellow at the institute for bands that these in culture at the university of virginia and a visiting scholar at the institute for Public Knowledge and new york university. He writes about culture and arts for various publications and is currently at work on a book about walking and im sorry im reading these out of order. Garnet is all the way at the end. [applause] honoree jeffers who is next to garnet is a poet fiction writer and critic and has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the arts in the winter Runner Foundation to the library of congress. She is the author four books of poetry and is currently at work on the fifth and exploration of the life and times of the 18th century poet phyllis wheatley. [applause] kima jones has been published in in pr pink scratch magazine. She has received fellowships from penn center usa and dowell colony and is currently an mfa candidate in fiction and rodney jacks caller and msa program for writers at Warren Wilson college. Kima jones. [applause] finally kiese laymon is associate professor of english and African Studies at Vassar College in and the recent grisham writer in residence at the university of mississippi. He is the author of the novel Long Division how to fully kill yourself and others in america and the forthcoming memoir called heavy. Kiese laymon. [applause] so lets jump right in. I thought first i would lead by asking your question about James BaldwinJames Baldwin. When i was searching for a writer on the contemporary american black experience baldwin felt inevitable yet he died nearly 30 years ago. So my question for you is what makes his writing continue to resonate and if you turn to him is ideal for comfort comfort and solace. The first thing i should say is my university will get very angry at me i just recently was promoted to full professor. Oh wow congratulations. [applause] and my colleagues might be watching this morning. James baldwin, i have a very involved relationship with him because my father was friends with him so when i first encountered his name on and countered it as my dad mentioning that they hung out at the village together and everything and then i met him when i was 14 and i remember his assistant coming up behind him and tracing a fur collared camel hair coat and i thought thats going to be me. [laughter] but as an adult in graduate school his words along with audrey lords literally saved my life. One of the africanamericans in the program to mind knowledge and the first africanamerican to graduate in poetry and msa program at the university of alabama so its very, very isolated and my friends were the ladies who cleaned the building and we would talk about those sorts of things and i remember you know i was young then. I was in my 20s and i was feeling a real rage in this rage helps me but it was sustained and it was intellectual. It was not messy rage. It was purposeful rage and that was a real lesson that i learned from him. When he began speaking to his nephew who is also his namesake jimmy and at one point he says im paraphrasing, in those days we were trembling, talking about the 60s. But if we had not loved each other we would not have survived. Time and again thats where a return to baldwin. He writes with a palpable force. He writes with the fairness fierceness. Its his love and his belief in the potency of love. And we tend to stand away from it thinking that love, here we go another kumbaya moment. But for him love with this vibrant potent cohesive active forceful thing which allowed us to see with more clarity, which allowed us to see more deeply and to not only see it but see it clearly and with the wonderful thing about him is that he argues for full humanity people whose humanity is treated less than by appealing to a common humanity and so he never is in search of an enemy and is continually recognizing how much the degradation of we can be great in ourselves and he continually reminds us what it means to put ourselves in someone elses shoes and arguing with someone we had to argue as a human being and where never let off the hook for the responsibility to love them. In other words their criticism doesnt preclude a responsibility to love and our love doesnt include us criticizing people. Thats where baldwin i think has not and never will lose his relevance. He continually reminds us how important love is and what potent love should undergird and propel our criticisms and perfections and responses to each other. I think baldwins work is resonating with me ever since i read it when i was 15 or 16 but i think it resonates more during president ial elections in this country because thats when i think we see the most magnificent liars lie back to us, the most magnificent magnificently and one of the things that baldwins work encourages me to understand is political moment particularly when we have their rights hearkening back to this great past that didnt exist for a lot of folks on this panel and the left rallying a american exceptionalism that still seems to disregard the experiences of a lot of us on the panel at think baldwin is saying that american and americanness is rooted in deception is rooted in dishonesty and theres no way for us to get from point a unless we are honest about a and that resonates with me as a writer but particularly in these political seasons when we see the worst of america on display. I think baldwins work is a reminder of what the american nest of us could be. When i think of baldwin he is very attached to my childhood. I grew up in harlem and as a child come, the girl child interested in the arts it was just a really beautiful time. There was a royal reclamation of our heroes especially our literary heroes. It was a time that langston hughes, these people were not far off ideas. They werent people that i discovered in college. They were part of my Elementary School experience and so when i learned about old when it really felt like i was kind of walking into a place where i wanted to be for the rest of my life. As well as the others, he felt like a supreme example of the kind of person and the artist that i wanted to be in the world and the things i wanted to do for myself and for my community. Fantastic. I have another baldwin question for you all. Which ties into this talk. Here is baldwin describing his experience as a reader. He says you think in your pain in your heart breaker and unprecedented in the history of the world. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me the most read the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive who had ever been alive. So my questions that kind of that quote is what was your experience of participating in this collection . As writers, we all write it in isolation and for the most part we are published individually. Once you have a copy of this book in your hand what felt different about it as a reader and a writer . How does it feel to be part of the choir rather than a soloist . Well. [laughter] i am leo. I was born july 23 and i share a birthday with monica lewinsky. [laughter] its a motley crew and co so its a motley crew. One of the things as a poet who does Historical Research what i find interesting being someone who is 49 is the way that younger folks look at baldwin that we need to take him in historical context. We look at him as one of our great profits but he was vilified by many of his contemporaries because he was a man and so one of the things as someone who does history my essay sticks out like a sore of palm really because its about the 18th century and you know im sure some people are flipping through like what has this got to do with Police Brutality . The thing that struck me about his saying you arent the first people who suffered is that the 18th century is really the og black lives matter. The british were a police force. Crispus addicks was a black man in the first of all in the boston massacre and there were all these other black men who were agitating for liberty and full citizenship. Its sort of radical black feminist so im writing about lack man and i think a couple of people were like why are you writing about but i do think that history is very important because when you reconfigure the president you also reconfigure the past, right . So thats what i think about all twin. He wasnt celebrated as a profit during his time but his words are very timely. All you have to do is go on social media and you constantly see these quotes by him and i find this really interesting because black movements despised him for being a black man. That was not surely black whatever that means and now we are all realizing he was like abraham, you know to us. Minibus ride in silence. It can feel like you are writing in a void and for all those competent writers there is a fear that you might avoid that silence which are writing and he met with that same silence. One of the marvelous things about this book is suddenly you are responding as part of a broader conversation. One of the things that i come to begin we were trembling. Reading the other essays helped give that sense of solidarity. C. S. Lewiss remarks in friendship and giving the definition definition of friendship, oh you too so this book my experiences are not my own and it you too, you too so theres a sense of solidarity but theres also a sense of friendship and that loops around to baldwin thinking we love each other so to have your experiences echoed our in some places challenged and it had that effect but when he was writing to his nephew he got into this issue of innocence where he said oh your countrymen see whats going on. They can go and they can talk to their grandmother. She has seen all these things. She is not hidden. I think of this book like baldwins grandma. Heres this book, a multitude of witnesses saying here is what its like to live in contemporary america. Here is what it has been like to get to this point and here are some possibilities and here are some of the limitations imposed when baldwin talked to his nephew and here are the ways in which we have tried to improvise and fight and navigate around these limitations and here we are in our multitude and its richness and more than anything the marvelous thing about this but it reminded me that what happens to us is not the entire story of who we are. We are more than what has happened to us so reading this book became important reminder and it is part friendship part testimony, part inspiration. You know, during ferguson and during the baltimore uprisings like you i witnessed a lot of that via twitter and i would be up until 3 00 in the morning unable to look away and i did a lot of that with Jericho Brown another contributor in the book and there wouldnt be much to say except oh my god i cant believe this. I cant believe this is happening. And some nights we would just sign off, i love you. If no one else has told you today and love you, i love you announce hindsight i realize how much damage watching hour after hour that footage did but i felt like i really wanted to be a witness to that at that time so when i see my name in communion with these other writers it really does feel like i love you and i want to be here for you and i want to support you in this way. Even after we close our browsers in our laptops we still have to go out into the world and navigate it and show up at our jobs and show up for our families and ourselves in a real way. We cant just slouch through life so it just affirmed for me we are all going through this thats up here but on this level i know these people are here for me. That feels really good and i feel special. Thank you for that. That was a great answer. I just think public expressions of lot joy are part of the reason we are still here, part of the reasons we are all up here today. So when i saw my name in the book and when i got the hardcover, im from jackson. Jasmine you are the greatest writer in my world so i was just like dang, i made it. [laughter] i feel the same way and we got paid. And that is honesty. The second thing i felt her in the process was a lot of different people asked me to use my work for anthologies and often i say no because for a lot of reasons but one is because i often dont have the intellectual work and spiritual work in me to write the representational essay of some but somebodys anthologies so with with this particular anthologies when cathy came to me and said he wanted me and some other folks i was just like you know, there are a lot of Different Things i could have done but i want to be something in that anthology to speak to this joy in this new once joy that i got from the root and the route for me is my grandmama. A lot of people have asked me to anthologies and i wouldnt anthologized that piece in any other anthology in the world because i would have felt comfortable with what was on either side of my piece. These folks provided, massive amounts of history, love. I think that push against this notion of eating an endangered lack male in this way is really crucial so for me it felt like the piece found its way home and im just really happy. We need to say we are happy and im really thankful and happy. Can i just say one tiny thing exactly because i told myself i was never going to be on another race panel because i just got tired of explaining to people, how bad it was to be a black person. Thats not the entire experience but when you asked, i said all right, right . And when my aging came to me and said you know, i said okay im doing it and then they said you are getting paid. I was like [laughter] okay then. And thank you for those groceries by the way. That money. Real well. I appreciate you. [applause] and i just say this really quickly because i havent had the opportunity to thank you all in person but i would like to thank you all for agreeing to be a part of this. Im really proud of it and im so happy that we were able to come together and to form the School Course and do this. The great books of thank you all so much. [applause] i hope you all dont get mad when i ask you all a question. Im curious. So i have a twopart question. The first part is does this anthology provide more questions questions more answers than questions in the second part of the question is what the questions are you sitting with right now . I think what kiese said about representing black joy is very important if we were called, dont use the words anymore coined by nikki giovanni, black love is black wealth, right . My question and i hope i dont make anyone mad asking this question is, why is it always black people who are and why dont why people ever feel like they have the race . Thats my question as i finish this because we arent the ones who invented race. Emanuel kant and david hune invented race and we are living with the wages of that sin. So its always interesting to me that for example when i teach my students and i say to them, when you write a story why is it that no one ever has a race until the person walks into the room . I dont assume that everyone is white, right . I assume that everyone looks like me you know so i think what im curious about is why arent there any books where white people examine and even now as they use the word white i can feel people flinching in the room. If you say africanAmerican Woman or native American Woman people are like okay but as soon as you say white woman people start jumping like you are accusing them of something, right . I am not accusing anyone of anything. It exceeds a script for but i do wonder why it is that this is our burden,