Black Feminist in Public: Black Life, Literature and the Black Feminist Imagination—a Conversation Between Farah Jasmine Griffin and Janell Hobson

On September 25, Black feminist scholars Farah Jasmine Griffin and Janell Hobson took part in a public conversaton about their respective new books, discussing Black literature and the Black feminist imagination.

“When I talk about ‘Black feminist imagination,’ I am thinking of how Black women have been able to articulate the presence of an absence. How do we give voice to silence?”

We (Forever) Heart: Toni Morrison

“I wanted to show how painful this constructed horrible racism was on the most vulnerable people in a society—girls, black girls, poor girls—and that it really and truly could hurt you. So that’s what I was looking for, and no one—I thought—had written that book. So since I really wanted to read it, I thought I should write it.”

Black Herstory: Haunted By Margaret Garner

On February 18 — which is the 81st birthday of Toni Morrison — let’s also remember Margaret Garner, a slave woman whose herstory was memorialized in what is often considered Morrison’s greatest work: the 1988 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Beloved.