Join award-winning author Namwali Serpell for a reading and discussion of her new book On Morrison, a critical work on the writings of Toni Morrison.
Date: Tuesday, September 29, 2026
Time: 4 to 5:30 p.m.
Location: Racial Justice Resource Center, 2nd floor, Rockefeller Library, and online
Registration Required
Free and open to the public. Registration required. REGISTER HERE.
The author will open the event with a short reading from On Morrison followed by discussion with Professor Kevin Quashie, Brown University Department of English, and audience Q&A. Copies of On Morrison will be available for purchase on-site through the Brown Bookstore.
The event is sponsored by The George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation and Brown University Library.
On Morrison
On Morrison is a national best seller, named a best book of the year so far by The New York Times, The New Yorker, Vulture, Esquire, The Guardian, and Lit Hub.
Toni Morrison, Nobel Laureate and one of our most beloved writers, has inspired generations of readers. But her artistic genius is often overshadowed by her monumental public persona, perhaps because, as Namwali Serpell puts it, “she is our only truly canonical black female writer — and her work is highly complex.” In On Morrison, Serpell brings her unique experience as both an award-winning writer and a professor who teaches a course on Morrison at Harvard University to illuminate her masterful experiments with literary form.
This is Morrison as you’ve never encountered her before, a journey through her oeuvre—her fiction and criticism, as well as her lesser-known dramatic works and poetry—with contextual guidance and original close readings. At once accessible and uncompromisingly rigorous, On Morrison is a primer not only on how to read one of the most significant American authors of all time but also on how to read great works of literature in general. This dialogue on the page between two black women artist-readers is stylish, edifying, and thrilling in its scope and intelligence. – Penguin Random House
Namwali Serpell
Namwali Serpell was born in Lusaka and lives in New York. She is a fiction writer, a literary critic, and a professor of English at Harvard University. She is the author of three works of criticism, Seven Modes of Uncertainty (2014), Stranger Faces (2020), and On Morrison (2026), and two novels: The Old Drift (2019) and The Furrows (2022), for which she was awarded the George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation Fellowship in 2020 toward the advance of its completion.
Kevin Quashie
Kevin Quashie teaches black cultural and literary studies and is a professor in the department of English at Brown University. Primarily, he focuses on black feminism, queer studies, and aesthetics, especially poetics. He is the author or editor of four books, most recently The Sovereignty of Quiet: Beyond Resistance in Black Culture (2012) and Black Aliveness, or A Poetics of Being (2021). Black Aliveness has been awarded two prizes: the James Russell Lowell Prize from the Modern Language Association (2022) and the Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism from the Poetry Foundation (2022).