Richmond Public Library is proud to present our fourth annual Read Up Richmond event featuring Booker Prize winner Marlon James in conversation with Njelle Hamilton, Associate Professor of Literature at the University of Virginia. The event will be followed by an audience Q&A books will be available for purchase and signing at the event.

The event will also be livestreamed via the Library's YouTube Channel: rvalibrary.info/YouTube (Attendees are not required to register if viewing virtually.)

Marlon James was born in Jamaica in 1970. He is the author of the New York Times-bestseller Black Leopard, Red Wolf, which was a finalist for the National Book Award for fiction in 2019. His novel A Brief History of Seven Killings won the 2015 Man Booker Prize. It was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and won the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature for fiction, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for fiction, and the Minnesota Book Award. It was also a New York Times Notable Book. James is also the author of The Book of Night Women, which won the 2010 Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Minnesota Book Award, and was a finalist for the 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award in fiction and an NAACP Image Award. His first novel, John Crow’s Devil, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for first fiction and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, and was a New York Times Editors’ Choice. James divides his time between Minnesota and New York.

Dr. Hamilton is Associate Professor of English and Africana Studies at the University of Virginia, and the book review editor of Anthurium Caribbean Studies Journal. The author of Phonographic Memories: Popular Music and the Contemporary Caribbean Novel (Rutgers 2019), Hamilton specializes in 20th and 21st century Caribbean literary and cultural studies, with particular focus on narrative theory and fiction craft. Her essays on sound studies, trauma theory, and the physics of time have appeared in Anthurium, Journal of West Indian Literature, sx salon, and Critical Perspectives on Indo-Caribbean Women’s Literature, while her short fiction has been published in Centripetal and Pree Lit. She is working on two projects: a novel; and a monograph tentatively titled The Physics of Caribbean Time, which embraces storytelling as method and form to explore the alternative clocks and narrative forms that might more accurately render how Caribbean people experience time.

Read Up Richmond challenges people to read differently, to read outside one’s own lived experience to develop an understanding of the world. This program is an opportunity for people from different walks of life to come together in the library to learn together, to enter into a conversation with the larger community, to share the same space, making Richmond a more connected, more civil place. This program is made possible through the generous support of the Richmond Public Library Foundation and the Friends of the Richmond Public Library.