LOCAL>> Race in America2023: Daniel Black | Kristin Henning

Race in America 2023: Our Stories. Our Voices. Now More than Ever!  

Online author event
* Tuesday, February 14, 5:30 pm

In honor of Black History Month and recognizing the importance of uplifting diverse voices and stories now and throughout the year, we are presenting our Annual Race in America event. We will host a mini series of live-online discussions covering a range of provacative issues and exploring possible solutions featuring authors and agents of change, with particular experiences and expertise. Whether you are part of these communities or an ally, we invite you to listen, participate and be a part of the necessary change.

Additionally, we have other special presentations that are part of our “Conversations with Authors” program as tribute to Black History Month. This includes author and Civil Rights leader, Ben Jealous; Lesley Brown, the author of a new and radical memoir , Blackgirl from Mars, and much more. Check the Book Passage calendar for event dates, times and details.

Black On Black: On Our Resilience and Brilliance in America – Acclaimed novelist and scholar Daniel Black has spent a career writing into the unspoken, fleshing out, through storytelling, pain that can’t be described. Now, in his debut essay collection, Black gives voice to the experiences of those who often find themselves on the margins.

Tackling topics ranging from police brutality to the AIDS crisis to the role of HBCUs to queer representation in the black church, Black on Black celebrates the resilience, fortitude, and survival of black people in a land where their body is always on display.

Daniel Black is an author and professor of African American studies at Clark Atlanta University. His books include The Coming, Perfect Peace and They Tell Me of a Home. He is the winner of the Distinguished Writer Award from the Middle-Atlantic Writer\’s Association and has been nominated for the Townsend Prize for Fiction, the Ernest J. Gaines Award,and the Georgia Author of the Year Award.

Rage of Innocence: How America Criminalizes Black Youth by Kristin Henning – A brilliant analysis of the foundations of racist policing in America: the day-to-day brutalities, largely hidden from public view, endured by Black youth growing up under constant surveillance and the persistent threat of physical and psychological abuse by police.

Drawing upon twenty-five years of experience representing Black youth in Washington, D.C.’s juvenile courts, Kristin Henning confronts America’s irrational, manufactured fears of these young people and makes a powerfully compelling case that the crisis in racist American policing begins with its relationship to Black children.

Kristin Henning is a nationally recognized trainer and consultant on the intersection of race, adolescence, and policing. She is the Blume Professor of Law and director of the Juvenile Justice Clinic and Initiative at the Georgetown University Law Center; from 1998 to 2001 she was the lead attorney of the Juvenile Unit at the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia.

Awards she has received include the 2021 Leadership Prize from the Juvenile Law Center and the 2013 Robert E. Shepherd, Jr. Award for Excellence in Juvenile Defense from the National Juvenile Defender Center.