Montclair's Dionne Ford In Conversation With Tracy K. Smith This Week

Montclair author Dionne Ford will be in conversation with former US Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize-winning author and poet Tracy K. Smith in Montclair on Thursday November 16. They will be talking about Tracy’s new book, out this week, To Free the Captives: A Plea for the American Soul, a self-examination study of memories, family, and history, exploring what it means to be free and looking at how we can move forward.

This book is going to be much discussed for many years to come. With rave reviews in The Washington Post, Boston Globe, and as seen on MSNBC’s Morning Joe,Tracy’s powerful memoir digs into the historical archive to help navigate the "din of human division and strife" and to reveal that she is “not Free but rather Freed, a guest in the places — we might just as easily call them institutions — where freedom is professed.”

Dionne is the author of the memoir Go Back and Get It and co-editor of the anthology Slavery's Descendants: Shared Legacies of Race and Reconciliation. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Virginia Quarterly Review, LitHub, New Jersey Monthly, Rumpus, and Ebony, and other publications, and currently teaches creative writing at Fordham University.

The talk will be held in Presentation Hall, The School of Communication and Media at Montclair State University in Montclair. Free parking will be available at the Red Hawk Parking Deck for all event ticket holders.

Tickets to hear Tracy in person cost $35, and include one signed copy of the book To Free the Captives (value $27). Dionne’s books will also be for sale at the event, and both authors will be signing books after the talk.

S2G’s Montclair Literary Festival is the premier literary festival in New Jersey. Since its inception seven years ago, the festival has attracted acclaimed authors including Colson Whitehead, Elizabeth Alexander, Jennifer Egan, Don Winslow, Trevor Noah, Patti Smith, Malcolm Gladwell, Isabel Allende, Henry Winkler, Douglas Stuart, Don Lemon, Jane Fonda, Paul Krugman, Erik Larson, Colm Tóibín, Kwame Alexander, Alan Cumming, Min Jin Lee, Chelsea Clinton, Salman Rushdie, and Paul Auster

Succeed2gether's Montclair Literary Festival organizing committee wishes to thank its primary festival partners – Montclair State University, Watchung Booksellers, Montclair Public Library – festival sponsors, event sponsors, our many community supporters and volunteers.