Presented in partnership with Joseph-Beth Booksellers, a conversation with Percival Everett, moderated by Yalie Saweda Kamara.
Pulitzer and Booker Prize finalist Percival Everett is the author James. Sierra Leonean American writer, educator and researcher Yalie Saweda Kamara served as the 2022-2023 Cincinnati and Mercantile Library Poet Laureate and 2023 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow.
James is a brilliant, action-packed reimagining of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn told from the enslaved Jim’s point of view.
When the enslaved Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a man in New Orleans, separated from his wife and daughter forever, he decides to hide on nearby Jackson Island until he can formulate a plan. Meanwhile, Huck Finn has faked his own death to escape his violent father, recently returned to town. As all readers of American literature know, thus begins the dangerous and transcendent journey by raft down the Mississippi River toward the elusive and too-often-unreliable promise of the Free States and beyond. While many of the familiar set pieces of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn remain, Everett shows Jim’s agency, intelligence and compassion in a radically new light in James.
Your book is your ticket to the event. Purchase the book to attend the event. Price includes entry to the event for one person and one signed copy of James by Percival Everett.
About the Author
Percival Everett is a Distinguished Professor of English at USC. His most recent books include Dr. No (finalist for the NBCC Award for Fiction and winner of the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award), The Trees (finalist for the Booker Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction), Telephone (finalist for the Pulitzer Prize), So Much Blue, Erasure and I Am Not Sidney Poitier. He has received the NBCC Ivan Sandrof Life Achievement Award and The Windham Campbell Prize from Yale University. American Fiction, the feature film based on his novel Erasure, was released in 2023. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, the writer Danzy Senna, and their children.
