Darius James: April 21, 2019

After introductions by Peter Maravelis and Steve Dickison, Darius James prefaces his reading by expressing his gratitude to the space and his personal connection to many of the works featured in the bookstore. After contextualizing his book Negrophobia as coming out of his time living in the East Village, in New York, he reads "Subway Sequence," "INT. Donald Goines High School," and the apocalyptic closing section, all excerpts from Negrophobia. James breaks from the reading to take questions from the audience. Peter Maravelis comments on the timeliness of Negrophobia in the context of contemporary life, to which James remarks that the culture hasn't changed with the passage of time, and requires new strategies of reconceptualization and resistance. He speaks on the screenplay format of Negrophobia as a response to the failures of conventional narrative forms to capture the performantive aspects of the work. Prompted by Nicole Henares, James discusses the first publication of the book in the 1990s, and its relation to both stereotyping of black individuals in the media and his own relation to these images. The reading continues with James presenting a new work speculating on the death of Sun Ra, titled "Arkestration."

Darius James responds to further questions from the audience, following his reading from more recent work, in manuscript. He speaks, among other things, about his literary influences, and the influential role played by novelists Terry Southern, William Burroughs, and Black writers such as Ishmael Reed and Lower East Side New Yorkers Steve Cannon and John Farris.