In this startling group memoir, four friendsblack and white, gay and straight, immigrant and American-bornuse Toni Morrisons novels as a springboard for intimate and revealing conversations about the problems of everyday racism and living whole in times of uncertainty. Labyrinth, the Princeton Public Library, and the YWCA invite you for a presentation and discussion.

Tackling everything from first love and Soul Train to police brutality and the Black Lives Matter movement, the authors take up what it means to read challenging literature collaboratively and to learn in public as an act of individual reckoning and social resistance.

Framing their book club around collective secrets, the group bears witness to how Morrisons works and words can propel us forward while we sit with uncomfortable questions about race, gender, and identity. How do we make space for black vulnerability in the face of white supremacy and internalized self-loathing? How do historical novels speak to us now about the delicate seams that hold black minds and bodies together?

This slim and brilliant confessional offers a radical vision for book clubs as sites of self-discovery and communal healing. The Toni Morrison Book Club insists that we find ourselves in fiction and think of Morrison as a spiritual guide to our most difficult thoughts and ideas about American literature and life.

Juda Bennett is professor of English at The College of New Jersey and the author of Toni Morrison and the Queer Pleasure of Ghosts and of The Passing Figure. Winnifred Brown-Glaude is associate professor of African American studies and sociology at The College of New Jersey and the author of Higglers in Kingston: Womens Informal Work in Jamaica. Cassandra Jackson is professor of English at The College of New Jersey and the author of Violence, Visual Studies, and the Black Male Body and of Barriers between Us: Interracial Sex in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction. Piper Kendrix Williams is associate professor of English and African American studies at The College of New Jersey and the coeditor of Representing Segregation: Toward an Aesthetics of Living Jim Crow, and Other Forms of Racial Division.

This event is co-sponsored by the Princeton Public Library and the Princeton YWCA