Close Conversations @theCathedral
As the Madeleine L’Engle Fellow at the Cathedral of St. John in New York, Elizabeth Howard moderated a series of conversations considering issues of race, incarceration, education, climate change, poetry and literature. It is through dialogue and conversation we can work through conflict, express our ideas and describe to others how we feel. It is through dialogue that we can come together.
Incarceration: From the Inside Looking Out and the Outside Looking In
Interpreting James Baldwin today: If Beale Street Could Talk/Little Man, Little Man
Langston Hughes: Harlem and the Sacred
Religion, Politics, and Climate Change with Patrick Egan
Race Inequality, and Education with Dr. Carla Shedd and Dr. R. L’Heureux Lewis McCoy
Incarceration: From the Inside Looking Out and the Outside Looking In
How does it feel to be incarcerated in an American Prison?
How difficult is the transition into society?
Elizabeth Howard in conversation with Robert Pollock, editor of The Named and the Nameless: 2018 Prison Writing Awards Anthology, Samuel Cabassa, Certified Recovery Peer Advocate and Lanetta Hill, a supervisor of services for the Underserved.
Tuesday, 22 January
Interpreting James Baldwin today: If Beale Street Could Talk/Little Man, Little Man
Nicholas Boggs and Gabrielle Bellot in conversation with Elizabeth Howard around the novel If Beale Street Could Talk, recently released as a movie and directed by Academy Award-winner Barry Jenkins, and Little Man, Little Man by James Baldwin with illustrations by Yoran Cazac. Little Man was republished in 2018 with an introduction by Nicholas Boggs and Jennifer DeVere Brody.
Gabrielle Bellot is a staff writer for Literary Hub. Her work has appeared in
The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Cut, The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books, The Paris Review Daily, Tin House, Guernica, and many other places. She holds an M.F.A. and PhD, both in English, from Florida State University, and she teaches workshops at Catapult and Gotham Writers Workshop in New York.
Nicholas Boggs teaches in the Department of English at New York University.
Co-editor and author of the introduction to James Baldwin’s children’s book, Little Man, Little Man: A Story of Childhood (Duke, 2018), his writing has also been anthologized in The Cambridge Companion to James Baldwin and James Baldwin Now. He is currently at work on a literary biography of Baldwin, forthcoming from Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.
2018 Programs
Wednesday, October 17
Langston Hughes: Harlem and the Sacred
Dr. Wallace Best, author of Langston’s Salvation: American Religion and the Bard of Harlem and professor of Religion and African American Studies at Princeton University.
Wednesday, November 14
Religion, Politics, and Climate Change with Patrick Egan
Patrick J. Egan is Associate Professor of Politics and Public Policy at New York University. He has written about race and religion in the opposition to same-sex marriage, political attitudes about climate change, and partisan politics.
Wednesday, December 13
Race Inequality, and Education with Dr. Carla Shedd and Dr. R. L’Heureux Lewis McCoy
Carla Shedd is Associate Professor of Urban Education at The Graduate Center, CUNY and the author of Unequal City: Race, Schools, and Perceptions of injustice, which explores obstacles facing urban adolescents in Chicago.
L’Heureux Lewis-McCoy is an Associate Professor of Sociology of Education at New York University. His research concentrates on issues of educational inequality, the role of race in contemporary society, and gender studies.