Join us for an intimate salon with author Farah Jasmine Griffin reading from her latest work Read Until You Understand: The Profound Wisdom of Black Life and Literature. The Schomburg Courtyard Salon series is an outdoor event featuring authors whose books were published during quarantine. The author will be available to sign books throughout the evening.

A brilliant scholar imparts the lessons bequeathed by the Black community and its remarkable artists and thinkers. Farah Jasmine Griffin has taken to her heart the phrase “read until you understand,” a line her father, who died when she was nine, wrote in a note to her. She has made it central to this book about love of the majestic power of words and love of the magnificence of Black life. Griffin has spent years rooted in the culture of Black genius and the legacy of books that her father left her. A beloved professor, she has devoted herself to passing these works and their wisdom on to generations of students. Griffin entwines memoir, history, and art while she keeps her finger on the pulse of the present, asking us to grapple with the continuing struggle for Black freedom and the ongoing project that is American democracy. She challenges us to reckon with our commitment to all the nation’s inhabitants and our responsibilities to all humanity.

Farah Jasmine Griffin was the inaugural chair of the African American and African Diaspora Studies Department at Columbia University, where she is also William B. Ransford Professor of English and Comparative Literature. She is the author of numerous books, most recently of Read Until You Understand: The Profound Wisdom of Black Life and Literature, and the recipient of a 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship. She lives in New York.