Join us for our Summer Arts Series event with writers Aminatta Forna and Glen Retief

Aminatta Forna and Glen Retief:

Two friends on moving to America and writing during a time of climate change

Thursday, July 8, 2021

7:00-8:30 pm (Eastern)

Join us for our modern online salon* with Aminatta Forna and Glen Retief. Born on the African continent, Aminatta and Glen were both eyewitnesses to violent struggles over power and freedom in their countries. As writers who have lived in the USA, they provide keen insights into what it is like to be a foreigner in America.

We will end the gathering with your questions and you will have the option to connect with a small group to share your own thoughts and insights. This will be a salon for the 21st Century where brilliant people gather for meaningful and artful conversation. If you like, you can dress up in your most artistic or elegant garb and come with a mocktail or cocktail. You will think, laugh, feel, and come away enriched and more engaged in the world.

Learn more

$12 registration fee or $25 for all three events in the series. In the hopes of making these programs accessible to all, unlimited scholarships are available, please contact aram@thebtscenter.org.

The first 50 people who register for this online event (or the whole series) will receive a free copy of Aminatta Forna’s new book of essays, The Window Seat: Notes from a Life in Motion! (Limited to registrants with a mailing address in USA & Canada.)

*About salon-style gatherings: In the early 1900’s the world was changing quickly—politically, socially, and artistically. Starting in 1903, an American couple, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, organized literary and artistic salons in their Paris apartment. Little known creatives on the cusp of major breakthroughs filled the intimate space. Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse turned up along with up-and-coming writers F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Sherwood Anderson. They shared some of their work and then engaged in late night lively discussions about art, politics, love, and the rumblings of massive global shifts already beginning to happen.

View this video to learn more about the event:

Aminatta Forna and Glen Retief promo video

Aminatta Forna

Aminatta Forna, OBE (born 1964) is a Scottish and Sierra Leonean writer. She is the author of a memoir, The Devil That Danced on the Water, and four novels: Ancestor Stones (2006), The Memory of Love (2010), The Hired Man (2013) and Happiness (2018). Her novel The Memory of Love was awarded the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for "Best Book" in 2011, and was also shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction. Forna is Professor of Creative Writing at Bath Spa University and was, until recently, Sterling Brown Distinguished Visiting Professor at Williams College in Massachusetts. She is currently Lannan Visiting Chair of Poetics at Georgetown University in Washington, DC.

Glen Retief

Glen Retief grew up in South Africa during the apartheid era, where he was involved in national as well as LGBT liberation movements. His book The Jack Bank: A Memoir of a South African Childhood (St. Martin’s Press, April 2011) won a Lambda Literary Award and was selected as an Africa Book Club Book of 2011. He has published short stories and memoirs in journals including Virginia Quarterly Review, Kenyon Review, and Hotel Amerika. He writes an occasional column of personal essays for the South African newspaper, The Daily Maverick; teaches Creative Nonfiction at Susquehanna University; and is currently a 2021-22 Fulbright US Scholar in Mamelodi, South Africa.