Poets & Writers Theater

For this LIVE From NYPL event, Jamaica Kincaid and illustrator Kara Walker discuss their collaborative book, An Encyclopedia of Gardening for Colored Children (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024), and the racial, colonial history of gardening in a conversation with Hilton Als.

“The minute I was born I was not just myself, but the memory of someone else,” reads Hilton Als from his essay collection White Girls, published in 2014 by McSweeney’s and reprinted in 2019 by Penguin Books, in this video in which he tells the story of how he got his name.

“Joan Didion taught me that family was always part of the story, along with place, and that the writer’s job was to face the terror, beauty, banality, and truth inherent in being a citizen of both.” In this video, Hilton Als speaks about Joan Didion’s influence on his writing at a celebration of her life and work held at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York.

The New Yorker staff writer Hilton Als spoke with Pulitzer Prize-winning author Junot Díaz about work and inspiration at an event earlier this month at the Strand Book Store in New York City.