The Harrisburg Book Festival is honored to host award-winning author, photographer, and art historian Teju Cole for a conversation and signing on his new novel, Tremor. This event will take place at the Midtown Scholar Bookstore.
Cole will be in conversation with Dr. Samuel Kọ́láwọlé.
This event is free and open to the public; no registration required. Seating is general admission; first come, first served. A book signing will immediately follow the conversation. Purchase of the author’s new book from the Midtown Scholar Bookstore is required for entry to the signing line.
A powerful, wide-ranging novel that masterfully explores what constitutes a meaningful life in a violent world—from the celebrated author of Open City.
Life is hopeless but it is not serious. We have to have danced while we could and, later, to have danced again in the telling.
A weekend spent antiquing is shadowed by the colonial atrocities that occurred on that land. A walk at dusk is interrupted by casual racism. A loving marriage is riven by mysterious tensions. And a remarkable cascade of voices speak out from a pulsing metropolis.
We're invited to experience these events and more through the eyes and ears of Tunde, a West African man currently working as a teacher of photography on a renowned New England campus. He is a reader, a listener, a traveler, drawn to many different kinds of stories: stories from history and epic; stories of friends, family, and strangers; stories found in books and films. Together these stories make up his days. In aggregate these days comprise a life.
Tremor is a startling work of realism and invention that engages brilliantly with literature, music, race, history, and much more, as it examines the passage of time and how we mark it. It is a reckoning with human survival amidst “history’s own brutality, which refuses symmetries and seldom consoles,” but it is also a testament to the possibility of joy. As he did in his magnificent debut Open City, Teju Cole once again offers narration with all its senses alert, a surprising and deeply essential work from a beacon of contemporary literature.
About the Speakers:
Teju Cole was born in the U.S. in 1975 to Nigerian parents and grew up in Lagos. His books include the novel Open City, the essay collections Known and Strange Things and Black Paper, and the experimental photo book Blind Spot. He has been honored with the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Internationaler Literaturpreis, the Windham-Campbell Prize, and a Guggenheim Fellowship, among others. He is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Cole is currently a professor of the practice of creative writing at Harvard University and a contributing writer to The New York Times Magazine.
Dr. Samuel Kọ́láwọlé was born and raised in Ibadan, Nigeria. His stories have published in a variety of publications, including AGNI, New England Review, Georgia Review, The Hopkins Review, Gulf Coast, Washington Square Review, Harvard Review, and Image Journal.
His fiction has been supported with fellowships, residencies, and scholarships from the Norman Mailer Center, International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, Columbus State University’s Carson McCullers Center for Writers and Musicians, Clarion West Writers Workshop, Wellstone Center in the Redwoods, California, and Island Institute in Sitka, Alaska. He was a finalist for the Graywolf Press Africa Prize, shortlisted for UK’s The First Novel Prize in 2019, and won a 2019 Editor-Writer Mentorship Program for Diverse Writers. Samuel has taught creative writing in Nigeria, Ghana, Uganda, South Africa, Sweden, and the United States.
Kọ́láwọlé studied at the University of Ibadan and holds a Master of Arts degree in Creative Writing with distinction from Rhodes University, South Africa. A graduate of the MFA in Writing and Publishing at Vermont College of Fine Arts, he returned to VCFA to join the faculty of the low-residency MFA program. He earned his PhD in English and Creative Writing from Georgia State University.
Kọ́láwọlé teaches fiction writing full-time at Pennsylvania State University, where he is an Assistant Professor of English and African Studies.
His novel The Road to the Salt Sea will be published by Amistad/HarperCollins in July 2024.
