A Baldwin Conversation
Join us on our closing day to celebrate the launch of For Those Who Come After with A Baldwin Conversation, a special talk on Baldwin's life and work featuring:
Nicholas Boggs, Author of Baldwin: A Love Story
Frank Leon Roberts, Professor, Amherst College & Podcast Co-Host, Finding James Baldwin: The Magpie Years.
Introduction by idris brewster, founder of Kinfolk Tech
Nicholas Boggs
Nicholas Boggs is the New York Times bestselling author of Baldwin: A Love Story, the first major biography of the iconic figure in over three decades. He also co-edited a new edition of Baldwin's collaboration with French artist Yoran Cazac, Little Man, Little Man: A Story of Childhood (2018). He is the recipient of a 2023 Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant and fellowships from the Leon Levy Center for Biography, the Scholars-in-Residence program at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the Gilder Lehrman Center and Beinecke Library at Yale, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, as well as residencies at Yaddo and MacDowell. Most recently he was the 2024-2025 John Hope Franklin Fellow at the National Humanities Center. Born and raised in Washington, D.C., he received his BA from Yale and his PhD from Columbia, both in English, as well as an MFA in Creative Writing from American University.
Frank Leon Roberts
Dr. Frank Leon Roberts is a writer, activist, scholar, and award-winning political organizer. A veteran racial justice activist, he is the co-founder of the National Black Justice Coalition and former special assistant to civil rights attorney Johnnie Cochran. A professor of English and Black Studies at Amherst College, heis currently at work on two books about the life and legacy of James Baldwin. The first, James Baldwin’s Critical Stages, is a study of Baldwin’s overlooked career as a playwright. The second, James Baldwin’s Magpie Years: A Harlem Preacher’s Coming of Age, is a new volume in collaboration with the Baldwin Estate that draws on Frank’s rediscovery of Baldwin’s earliest writings as a teenage Pentecostal minister in Harlem.
Dr. Roberts is also the founder and executive director of The Baldwin Hansberry Project, an award-winning nonprofit organization that seeks to preserve and promote Baldwin’s legacy in the Harlem community and beyond. Since its founding, The Baldwin Hansberry Project has received philanthropic support from The Roddenberry Foundation and Kate & Steven Spielberg, among other major sources. His popular Apple podcast Finding James Baldwin tells the story of Baldwin’s early New York City roots. A proud Native Son of New York City, he lives in Harlem and Amherst, Massachusetts.