Haystack Book Festival: The Brendan Gill Lecture with Robert Jones, Jr.
Date: 10/01/2021
Time: 6:00 pm-7:00 pm
Robert Jones, Jr. bestselling author of the critically acclaimed novel The Prophets will deliver “The Brendan Gill Lecture” at the Norfolk Library on the opening night of the Haystack Book Festival.
To accommodate varying audiences, there are three ways to attend this event:
- Live in-person @ the Norfolk Library* with 60 seats available
- In-person but live-streamed on the Norfolk Hub’s* large screen with 25 seats available
- Virtually live-streamed to watch from home.
*Proof of vaccination and masks required to attend in-person.
To register for your preferred viewing mode for this event, click HERE.
Mr. Jones is a writer from New York City. He received his BFA in creative writing, and MFA in fiction from Brooklyn College. He has written for numerous publications, including The New York Times, Essence, and The Paris Review. He is the creator and curator of the social justice, social media community Son of Baldwin, which has more than 275,000 members across platforms. A singular and stunning novel about the forbidden union between two enslaved young men on a Deep South plantation, the refuge they find in each other, and a betrayal that threatens their existence, The Prophets is his debut novel.
Praise for The Prophets:
“May this book cast its spell on all of us, restore to us some memory of our most warrior and softest selves.” —The New York Times Book Review
“A new kind of epic…A grand achievement…While The Prophets‘ dreamy realism recalls the work of Toni Morrison…its penetrating focus on social dynamics stands out more singularly.” —Entertainment Weekly
“How devastating and glorious this is. Epic in its scale, intimate in its force, and lyrical in its beauty. The Prophets shakes right down to the bone what the American novel is, should do, and can be. That shuffling sound you hear is Morrison, Baldwin, and Angelou whooping and hollering both in pride and wonder.” – Marlon James, author of Black Leopard, Red Wolf
The Brendan Gill Lecture: Longtime Norfolk resident Brendan Gill died in 1997. In 1998 “The Brendan Gill Lecture” was established by the Norfolk Library Associates to honor Gill’s generous contributions to the Library. Brendan Gill wrote for The New Yorker magazine for over fifty years. He contributed short stories, profiles, book reviews and was in successive decades the movie, theater, and architectural critic. Haystack Book Festival is honored to have the Gill Lecture as part of the program.