Please join us for a special reading in honor of the posthumous publication of James Alan McPherson’s On Becoming an American Writer: Essays & Nonfiction, recently published by Godine. Encompassing themes of race, education, fame, law, and America’s past and future, these essays are McPherson at his most prescient and invaluable. James Alan McPherson was the first Black author to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and he was the recipient of a MacArthur genius grant, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and Paul Engle Award. His books include Crabcakes: A Memoir, A Region Not Home, Hue and Cry, and Elbow Room. In addition to an MFA , he had a law degree from Harvard. He taught for the Iowa Writers' Workshop for over 30 years.

Readers include Rachel McPherson, Writers’ Workshop faculty James Galvin and Jamel Brinkley, Nonfiction Writing Professor Emeritus,  Patricia Foster, and the director of the Writers’ Workshop, Lan Samantha Chang.

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