Professor Chris Holmes and Professor Derek Adams recently interviewed Namwali Serpell on Holmes’ podcast “Burned by Books” about her book On Morrison.
The description of On Morrison reads:
“Toni Morrison, Nobel Laureate and one of our most beloved writers, has inspired generations of readers. But her artistic genius is often overshadowed by her monumental public persona, perhaps because, as Namwali Serpell puts it, 'she is our only truly canonical black female writer—and her work is highly complex.' In On Morrison, Serpell brings her unique experience as both an award-winning writer and a professor who teaches a course on Morrison to illuminate her masterful experiments with literary form.
This is Morrison as you’ve never encountered her before, a journey through her oeuvre—her fiction and criticism, as well as her lesser-known dramatic works and poetry—with contextual guidance and original close readings. At once accessible and uncompromisingly rigorous, On Morrison is a primer not only on how to read one of the most significant American authors of all time but also on how to read great works of literature in general. This dialogue on the page between two black women artist-readers is stylish, edifying, and thrilling in its scope and intelligence.”
Namwali Serpell is a Professor of English at Harvard University. She has written multiple novels, short stories, and nonfiction books. Her debut novel, The Old Drift , won an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the Los Angeles Time’s Art Seidenbaum Award, the Grand Prix of Literary Associations Award, the Windham-Campbell Literature Prize, and was featured on The New York Times Book Review’s “100 Notable Books” list and TIME’s “100 Must-Read Books of the Year” list in 2019. Her second novel, The Furrows , was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction and longlisted for the Joyce Carol Oates Literary Prize. The book was also selected for The New York Time’s “10 Best Books of 2020” list, and Vulture named it one of its best books of 2022.
Derek Adams is Associate Professor of African American literature at Ithaca College and is currently teaching an upper-level seminar on Toni Morrison titled Across the Decades that challenges the origins of an assumed mythic status generally applied to her.
Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro Against World Literature , is published with Bloomsbury Publishing.
The episode can be found on websites such as Apple and Spotify.