Photo by MANNY JEFFERSON
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is one of the most prominent voices in literature today. She gained international recognition with her debut novel, Purple Hibiscus (2003), followed by Half of a Yellow Sun(2006), which explores the Nigerian Civil War, and Americanah (2013), a critically acclaimed novel about race, immigration, and love. Her TED Talk We Should All Be Feminists (2012) became a global feminist manifesto and was later adapted into a book. Her searing and exquisite new novel, Dream Count, is a publishing event ten years in the making.
In Dream Count, Adichie trains her fierce eye on four women in a sparkling, transcendent novel that takes up the very nature of love itself. Is true happiness ever attainable or is it just a fleeting state? And how honest must we be with ourselves in order to love, and to be loved? A trenchant reflection on the choices we make and those made for us, on daughters and mothers, on our interconnected world, Dream Count pulses with emotional urgency and poignant, unflinching observations of the human heart, in language that soars with beauty and power. It confirms Adichie’s status as one of the most exciting and dynamic writers on the literary landscape.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie will be in conversation with Key Jo Lee, chief of curatorial affairs and public programs at the Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD) in San Francisco.
About the Author
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie grew up in Nigeria. Her work has been translated into more than fifty-five languages. She is the author of the novels Purple Hibiscus, which won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize; Half of a Yellow Sun, which was the recipient of the Women’s Prize for Fiction “Best of the Best” award; Americanah, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award; the story collection The Thing Around Your Neck and the essays We Should All Be Feminists and Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions. Her most recent work is an essay about losing her father, Notes on Grief, and Mama’s Sleeping Scarf, a children’s book written as Nwa Grace-James. A recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, she divides her time between the United States and Nigeria.
About the Moderator
Key Jo Lee is currently chief of curatorial affairs and public programs at the Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD) in San Francisco. In her time at the Cleveland Museum of Art (2017 – 2022), Lee initiated the Cleveland Museum of Art’s first academic affairs department and became its first Director of Academic Affairs and Associate Curator of Special Projects. She ended her tenure at the CMA as Associate Curator of American Art curating the exhibition, Currents and Constellations: Black Art in Focus. Her book, Perceptual Drift: Black Art and an Ethics of Looking, was published by the CMA and Yale University Press in 2023.
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