Mining History

In their stirring recent works, Fatima Shaik, Kaitlyn Greenidge, and Saidiya V. Hartman recover lost and untold stories from the early history of Black freedom in America, starting with the Reconstruction era. In Economy Hall, Shaik gives vivid new life to 19th century ledgers her father rescued from the trash of an about-to-be-leveled building over half a century ago-approximately 3,000 handwritten pages revealing the goings-on of the progressive society the ledgers’ writer, a Haitian-American man named Ludger Boguille, co-founded in 1836. Applying “inviting” storytelling, in-depth archival research, and a “lyrical and mysterious and always captivating” depiction of her hometown New Orleans, her “monumental” (The New York Times) nonfiction work evocatively reconstructs one hundred years of Black activism surrounding the Tremé-based mutual aid society. Award-winning author and scholar Saidiya V. Hartman was awarded the 2021 PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction in honor of her most recent book, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments. The New York Times critic Parul Seghal calls Hartman “a sleuth of the archive,” and labels her book “an exhilarating work of history about daring adventures in love” undertaken by Black women from Reconstruction through to the Harlem Renaissance.
Whiting Award-winner Kaitlyn Greenidge joins these nonfiction writers with her novel, Libertie, which follows a freeborn Black girl’s journey from Reconstruction-era Brooklyn to Haiti and her mother, who becomes one of the first Black female doctors in U.S. history. The “sheer force of Greenidge’s vision” propels a novel that’s a “feat of monumental imagination” (The New York Times), a work that’s “psychologically astute, with an eye for nuance and a deep awareness of the ways that history influences the present” (NPR). Clarisse Rosaz Shariyf, senior director of literary programs at PEN America, will moderate their conversation about mining historical archives and melding research with personal experience-and how this process empowered their respective imaginations and creative processes as they told stories of Black excellence and ingenuity.
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The 2021 PEN World Voices Festival convenes fiction and nonfiction writers, poets, translators, thinkers, and activists to honor the art of the possible and the power of storytelling to push boundaries, challenge inherited narratives, and give voice to hope, courage, and survival. In a year when division and bloodshed have been fueled by hatreds based on race, ethnicity, and religion, the Festival celebrates resilience and courage, and summons the powers of the radical imagination and literature as gateways to reckoning and reconciliation.
Visit pen.org/festival to learn more about the 2021 PEN World Voices Festival.