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A few photos from our ‘Something to Say’ film program last week at Comfort Station. Photos courtesy of Ka’Sella M.

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Click here to reserve your ticket.

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July 18 | Everything Must Come to Light: The Films of Mpumi Njinge

Saturday, July 18th @ 7pm

Hyde Park Free Theater, 1448 E. 57th St.

About Njinge via Southside Projections:

South African clothing designer, actor, and filmmaker Mpumi Njinge completed just two films before his death of AIDS-related illness in 2002. Both films are informal documentaries exploring the lives of queer folk in the townships of South Africa. My Son the Bride (2002, 24 min.) documents what is thought to be the first same-sex marriage between black men in South Africa, exploring a young man’s struggle with his family and his community to accept his sexual preference and bless his union. Everything Must Come to Light (co-directed by Paolo Alberton, 2002, 25 min.) tells the stories of three lesbian sangomas (traditional healers) in Soweto, delving into their relationship with their ancestors, and the role their ancestors play in their healing powers and sexuality.

A post-screening conversation will follow. Click here for full details.

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Learn about Poetry Foundation events and awards and programs including Poetry Out Loud, the Writer's Almanac, and the Harriet Monroe Poetry Institute.

Next Thursday, July 9th at the Poetry Foundation in Chicago:

The Poetry Society of America continues its 2015 national series, A Celebration of International Poetry, at the Poetry Foundation in Chicago. The series will travel to six cities and focus on major international poets from any era.

In this third installment, we celebrate five emerging poets from Africa, Amy Lukau, Tsitsi Jaji, Ladan Osman, Viola Allo, and Warsan Shire, whose work has been recently published in the New Generation African Poets chapbook series, a publishing initiative of the African Poetry Book Fund (APBF). Co-editors Chris Abani and Kwame Dawes, along with APBF Editorial Board Member Matthew Shenoda, will discuss the project and introduce the emerging poets, who will then read from their work.

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Spring News from Chicago Reading Africa

The latest from Chicago Reading Africa

We’re reading Maryse Condé’s ‘Segu’. Join us for the discussion in May.

Good reads from around the web: Shailja Patel’s ‘The Road to Garissa’, an interview with poet Ladan Osman, and more

Catch us around town with Maaza Mengiste, Julie Iromuanya, and Teju Cole.

Read all this and more in our newsletter.

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[EVENT] When Fiction Tells the Truest Truth: a conversation between journalist Alex Kotlowitz and novelist Maaza Mengiste

Tuesday, February 24, 2015 6:00-7:30 pm

Annie May Swift Hall Peggy Dow Helmerich Auditorium, 1st floor 1920 Campus Drive, Evanston, IL

For more information, click here.

As writer-in-residence, Mengiste will also give a reading and lecture at later dates.

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The latest from Chicago Reading Africa:

We read Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah during our Fictive Kin discussion. In conversation with Kameelah Janeen Rasheed, she talks her own writing process, the importance of black stories and more.

This year you can listen to the Caine Prize shortlisted stories.

Need a Chicago spot to watch the World Cup? We got you!

Yinka Shonibare MBE is taking up some space in our city, and doing it wonderfully.

All this and more in our newsletter.

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Around Town: Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Dinaw Mengestu & Sven Augustijnen

A few upcoming events around our city:

Paul Mpagi Sepuya's residency talk at Hyde Park Art Center Wednesday, March 26, 6pm Hyde Park Art Center

5020 S. Cornell Avenue Chicago, IL

Concerned with the structure and history of photography, Sepuya asks what it means for artists working with photography to be making portraiture today. Working primarily in color, Sepuya's photographic practice is sited in the artist's studio where he often portrays young men--friends and acquaintances--collapsing the space between the subject and photographer, highlighting the relationship between the two and his active role, despite being behind the camera. In his words, he attempts "to challenge the diminishment of the portrait photographer and assert the importance of the role of the artist as rooted in time and place."  The studio also acts as an important space for editing where Sepuya works with both primary photograhs and re-photographed materials from the studio space itself, both of which define and document his practice. Through this process, Sepuya seeks "the possibility of return through reproduction...No two returns are the same." Brian O'Doherty's "collage of compressed tenses [within] studio time" allows for the emergence of a space between the documentary and the imaginary, of possibility. While in Chicago, Sepuya plans to mine queer legacies important to the development of Chicago's cultural life, including Samuel Steward and the Society for Human Rights. 

Dinaw Mengestu at UChicago

Thursday, April 3rd, 6pm International House, Home Room  1414 East 59th Street, Chicago, IL

From Dinaw Mengestu, a recipient of the National Book Foundation's 5 Under 35 Award, the New Yorker's 20 Under 40 Award, and a 2012 MacArthur Foundation genius grant, comes a novel about exile, and the loneliness and fragmentation of lives that straddle countries and histories. All Our Names is the story of a young man who comes of age during an African revolution, drawn from the hushed halls of his university into the intensifying clamor of the streets outside. But as the line between idealism and violence becomes increasingly blurred, and the path of revolution leads to almost certain destruction, he leaves behind his country and friends for America. 

Sven Augustijnen’s SPECTRES at Gene Siskel Film Center

Thursday, April 3rd, 6pm

164 N State St, Chicago, IL

Confronting the authorized version of an atrocity committed during the early days of post-colonial African rule, Sven Augustijnen’s SPECTRES focuses a critical eye on the official account of the murder of Patrice Lumumba, the Congo’s first elected Prime Minister. The film begins a half-century later as the filmmaker sets off in the company of an amiable former Belgian civil servant-turned-historian on a journey in which the political soon becomes personal and standard notions of historical evidence begin to veer into Errol Morris terrain. SPECTRES vividly demonstrates that reconciliation always begins by uncovering the truth. In French with English subtitles.