Nicholas Boggs — Baldwin: A Love Story - Mecca Jamilah Sullivan

“Compulsively interesting and beautifully written—there is something to treasure on every page. I absolutely loved it.” —Zadie SmithBaldwin: A Love Story tells the overlapping stories of Baldwin's most sustaining intimate and artistic relationships: with his mentor, the Black American painter Beauford Delaney; with his lover and muse, the Swiss painter Lucien Happersberger; and with his collaborators, the famed Turkish actor Engin Cezzar and the iconoclastic French artist Yoran Cazac.With Nicholas Boggs's rich and subtle narration of Baldwin's public and personal stories and his lucid interpretation of Baldwin's work, this biography shows for the first time how Baldwin drew on complex structures within these relationships--geographical, cultural, political, artistic, and erotic--and alchemized them into art that spoke truth to power and had an indelible impact on the civil rights movement and on Black and queer literary history. In doing so, this book magnifies our understanding of one of the major literary and cultural figures of the twentieth century, whose contributions only continue to grow in influence.PURCHASE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9780374178710?ic_referral=zp3tdxIQ66dev9JU4yGg6Yqs--luMZpRoxN_VGRmPaAwMyD_OX1uYOmCDeglac8D67JlmieSkJySxRTwN8qGQrGS22W4gNnlndLY3rYJf7CMicnECIkT7SMXxDHhMuKm22OXdxgNicholas Boggs was an undergraduate when he discovered James Baldwin’s out-of-print children’s book, Little Man, Little Man: A Story of Childhood, in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. After he tracked down its illustrator, the French artist Yoran Cazac, he went on to coedit an acclaimed new edition of the book in 2018. His writing has also been anthologized in The Cambridge Companion to James Baldwin, James Baldwin Now, and Speculative Light: The Arts of Beauford Delaney and James Baldwin. He is the recipient of a 2023 Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Leon Levy Center for Biography, the Beinecke Library and Gilder Lehrman Center at Yale, the Schomburg Center Scholars-in-Residence Program, and the National Humanities Center, as well as residencies at Yaddo and MacDowell. He received his BA in English from Yale, his MFA in creative writing from American University, and his PhD in English from Columbia. Born and raised in Washington, DC, he lives in Brooklyn, New York.Boggs is in conversation with Mecca Jamilah Sullivan, Ph.D. Sullivan is the author of three books: Big Girl, a New York Times Editors’ Choice and winner of the Balcones Fiction Prize and the Next Generation Indie Book Award for First Novel; The Poetics of Difference: Queer Feminist Forms in the African Diaspora, winner of the William Sanders Scarborough Prize from the MLA; and the short story collection, Blue Talk and Love, winner of the Judith Markowitz Award from Lambda Literary. She has earned honors from Bread Loaf, the Institute for Citizens and Scholars, the Mellon Foundation, the Center for Fiction, the NEA and others. Originally from Harlem, NY, she is Professor of English at Georgetown University in Washington DC.