Northwestern Michigan College and Title Track
N/A
Detroit, MI 49686
United States
VIRTUAL EVENT | FREE
BLACKNESS & BECOMING
Join the Northwestern Michigan College Library and Title Track
on Saturday, February 20, 2021, at 6 pm CST/7 pm EST
for a conversation about how memory, family and our collective histories shape our identity with musician and author Antonio Michael Downing (aka John Orpheus) and Kaylan Waterman, musician and host of Detroit’s Kumbuka, an annual remembrance of African Americans in the literary arts.
Antonio Michael’s new book, Saga Boy: My Life of Blackness and Becoming, is released in Canada this month and in the U.S. in September and available for preorder now. Written, in part, in our own Northern Michigan, Saga Boy tells the harrowing story of the 11-year old Antonio Michael’s displacement from the rainforest of Trinidad to the snowy wilderness of Canada upon the death of his beloved grandmother and his subsequent metamorphosis.
BLACKNESS & BECOMING promises a captivating conversation between Downing and Waterman, as well as an opportunity for Q&A and audience comment.
Saturday, February 20 at 6 pm CST/7pm EST
Zoom: https://nmc.zoom.us/j/93785985852 (Webinar ID: 937 8598 5852)
Antonio Michael Downing
Antonio Michael Downing is an author, speaker, and musical artist. His memoir Saga Boy was called “singularly dazzling” by Kiese Laymon and “the triumph of Blackness everywhere” by Scotiabank Giller Prize–winner Ian Williams.
Tracing the author’s journey from the tropical forests of Trinidad to the stark landscape of rural Canada—as well as that of his personal, musical metamorphosis—this is a poignant memoir of overcoming and belonging.