The vibe at Possible Futures was lit Thursday night — more specifically Kulturally Lit, as the literary-focused arts organization’s 100 Years of Baldwin Book Club had its inaugural meeting exploring the works of author, playwright, thinker, and civil rights icon James Baldwin.
Celebrated in his lifetime and only revered more with each passing year, James Baldwin has emerged as one of the most important American writers of the 20th century and one of the most incisive, excoriating, and illuminating thinkers about race in America. His novels — among them Go Tell It on the Mountain, Giovanni’s Room, and If Beale Street Could Talk — are already American classics, exploring the Black experience at home and abroad from multifacted, complex angles. He was also a prolific essayist, publishing steadily from 1949 until his death in 1987. His longform piece The Fire Next Time, published in 1963, remains one of the most powerful accounts around about racial tension and the possibility for violence and revolution in the United States.
