WritersMosaic presents: a Celebration of James Baldwin’s Centenary

This event took place on 27 February 2024. The information below is correct as of the publication date.

To be a black person in America, James Baldwin once said, was to be “in a state of rage almost all of the time.” Decades after his death, that sentiment, echoed in many countries in the West, still resonates. In collaboration with the Eccles Centre at the British Library, WritersMosaic presents an evening of writers and music celebrating James Baldwin’s centenary. Baldwin’s electrifying combination of emotional realism and moral strength – grappling with the racism, homophobia and brutality in a time of protest in the United States – still inspires marginalised voices everywhere.

WritersMosaic Director Colin Grant is joined by the writers Vanessa Kisuule, Paul Mendez and Chitra Ramaswamy to reflect on Baldwin’s prescience, and how his writing was informed by love, political activism, religion and the Blues. Missohio will create a short film journeying around him, and the British Library theatre will be suffused with live Jazz informed by Baldwin’s music collection.

Vanessa Kisuule is a writer and performer based in Bristol. She has won more than ten slam titles including the Roundhouse Slam 2014, Hammer and Tongue National Slam 2014 and the Nuyorican Poetry Slam. Her poem on the historic toppling of Edward Colston’s statue, ‘Hollow’, went viral in the summer of 2020. She has two poetry collections published by Burning Eye Books and her work was highly commended in the Forward Poetry Prize Anthology 2019. She was the Bristol City Poet for 2018-2020 and is currently working on her debut novel.

Paul Mendez was raised in the Black Country, the eldest of four children by Jehovah’s Witness parents of second-generation Jamaican heritage. After reading James Baldwin’s 1968 novel Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone in the summer of 2002, Mendez began keeping a journal, and his debut novel Rainbow Milk (Dialogue Books 2020) was featured in the Observer’s Top Ten Debut Novels and shortlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize. He is currently reading the MA in Black British Writing at Goldsmiths, University of London.

Chitra Ramaswamy is a journalist and author from London. Her latest book, Homelands: The History of a Friendship, (Canongate) explores her friendship with a 99-year-old German Jewish refugee. It won the Saltire Non-Fiction Book of the Year. Her first book, Expecting: The Inner Life of Pregnancy (Saraband 2016) won the Saltire First Book of the Year Award and was shortlisted for the Polari Prize. She writes for The Guardian and The Times Scotland, and broadcasts for BBC radio.

WritersMosaic is a division of the Royal Literary Fund.