We are pleased to welcome Zinzi Clemmons on Friday, July 17, at 6pm, to discuss her powerful new book, FREEDOM.

Free and open to the public.

This special author talk represents the first in a 10 Evening Series of important topics in history and society, in honor of America’s 250th! Learn more about our America’s 250th programs at HBGBookFest.com.

FREEDOM is a radically vulnerable, evocative, and challenging inquiry into the pursuit of freedom and the nature of struggle, resilience, and community. From the award-winning author of What We Lose.

About the Book

Weaving personal reflections with piercing insight and expansive vision across nine brilliant essays, Zinzi Clemmons explores the complexities of the elusive concept of freedom. As the daughter of a South African mother and a Trinidadian America father, she recounts growing up in the largely white, affluent town of Swarthmore, Pennsylvania—and her frequent travels to Johannesburg, where the lofty promise of freedom was all around her. Coming of age amidst the euphoria of South Africa's first all-race elections, she grapples with the legacy of Nelson Mandela and the shattered hope in the wake of the Obama era. Clemmons critiques the entrenched inequalities that haunt both countries, from the tragic loss of a childhood friend to the violence that often befalls women who have the audacity to be free.

In a deft mix of memoir, family history, criticism, and reportage, drawing on a vast range of material from Joan Didion to James Baldwin, political analysis and history to Clemmons’s own experiences across the globe, Freedom is an incendiary exploration of race, sex, class, and inheritance. In elegiac prose, Clemmons trains her discerning eye on American institutions and mythologies, probing the bounds of liberation and autonomy to interrogate our most enduring quest—the relentless pursuit of freedom for all.

About the Author

Zinzi Clemmons is the author of What We Lose, which was a finalist for the NBCC John Leonard First Book Prize and the Aspen Words Literary Prize. A National Book Foundation “5 Under 35” honoree, she was raised in Philadelphia by a South African mother and an American father. A cofounder of the literary journal Apogee, she lives in Northern California, where she serves as director of the creative writing program at the University of California, Davis.

About the Interviewer

André Naffis-Sahely is the author of two poetry collections, The Promised Land: Poems from Itinerant Life (2017) and High Desert (2022). He received the Cholmondeley Award for Poets in 2026.