“Baldwin, A Love Story: A Reading with Nicholas Boggs”

Tuesday, December 16, 4:15-5:45 p.m., U5/00.24 (An der Universit?t 5)

Nicholas Boggs will discuss the research and writing process that led to the republication of James Baldwin's collaboration with French artist Yoran Cazac, entitled Little Man, Little Man (Duke, 2018), and then the publication of his own Baldwin biography, entitled Baldwin: A Love Story (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2025). Topics addressed will include: the archive; structure; the productive tension between narrative non-fiction and scholarly writing; and the importance of place in Baldwin's life and work, and in these books. His presentation will include brief selected readings from the biography and from Baldwin, alongside slides and short videos, but it will be mostly a discussion how both of these books came into being, and the relationship between them, with time for questions at the end.

Nicholas Boggs is the author of Baldwin: A Love Story (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), which was a finalist for the 2025 Kirkus Prize and currently longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction. He is the co-editor of Baldwin’s collaboration with French artist Yoran Cazac, Little Man, Little Man: A Story of Childhood (Duke, 2018), and the recipient of a 2023 Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant as well as fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Scholars-in-Residence Program at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the Leon Levy Center for Biography, and the National Humanities Center, as well as residencies at Yaddo and MacDowell. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.