Safiya Sinclair | PEN Presents

Join PEN and Reparations Club for a reading and conversation with poet and author Safiya Sinclair upon the release of her new memoir, HOW TO SAY BABYLON. Exploring the experience of a repressive Rastafarian upbringing and raising questions of womanhood, independence, and authorship, Sinclair weaves the story of how she found her voice in poetry and came to reckon with the complex culture of her home.

This conversation will be followed by a Q&A and book signing.

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This in-person program will be co-presented by Reparations Club and is made possible in part by the support of the Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs and the Los Angeles County Department of Arts and Culture.

Participants

SAFIYA SINCLAIR was born and raised in Montego Bay, Jamaica. She is the author of the memoir How to Say Babylon, forthcoming from Simon & Schuster in October 2023. She is also the author of the poetry collection Cannibal, winner of a Whiting Writers’ Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Metcalf Award, the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Poetry, the Phillis Wheatley Book Award, and the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry. Cannibal was selected as one of the American Library Association’s Notable Books of the Year, and was a finalist for the PEN Center USA Literary Award and the Seamus Heaney First Book Award in the UK, and was longlisted for the PEN Open Book Award and the Dylan Thomas Prize.

Amanda Choo Quan is a Trinidadian-Jamaican writer and literary organizer. She won the 2020 Johnson and Amoy Achong Caribbean Writers Prize—one of the region’s most significant for emerging writers. Focusing on race, displacement and her homeland, her work appears in Harper’s Bazaar, NYLON, HuffPost, Caribbean Beat, Callaloo, and others. Choo Quan has been awarded fellowships from Callaloo, the Truman Capote Foundation, Juniper, and the Cropper Foundation.

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