Haystack Book Talk: Across Borders and Belonging—Exile, Identity, and American Lives Abroad

David Mayers, author of Seekers and Partisans: Americans Abroad in the Crisis Years 1936-1941 in conversation with Nicholas Boggs, author of Baldwin: A Love Story. 

David Mayers holds a joint appointment in the History and Political Science Departments at Boston University. His primary area of teaching/research interest is the history of US foreign relations/international politics. Mayers served on the board of trustees of the Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Relations from 1999 to 2005. He serves now as a member of the Management Committee, Transatlantic Studies Association. He chaired the Political Science Department from 2001 to 2007 and again in 2015-2018. Since 2013 he has been a Life Member of Clare Hall, Cambridge University.

Nicholas Boggs is the author of the New York Times bestselling biography, Baldwin: A Love Story, winner of the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography, the Stonewall/Israel Fishman Nonfiction Award, and the Randy Shilts Nonfiction Award. It was named a Top Ten Book of 2025 by Time Magazine and The Atlantic, and a New York Times Notable Book of the year. Boggs’ research and writing have been supported by fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Humanities Center, the Gilder Lehrman Center and Beinecke Library at Yale, the Scholars-in-Residence Program at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and the Leon Levy Center for Biography, as well as a 2023 Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant. He was educated at Yale (BA), American University (MFA), and Columbia (PhD). He lives in New York City.

Haystack Book Talks in Norfolk, CT, a production of the Norfolk Hub, brings together writers and thinkers in unmoderated conversation. The Haystack Book Festival takes place the first weekend in October at the Norfolk Library.

For more information and to register, please visit here.