1918 – 2018: The Harlem Renaissance @100

Join narrative non-fiction author Kevin Brown for an intimate discussion of one of the most influential creative arts movements in 20th century US history. Beginning during America’s entry into World War I and ending during the Great Depression, the Harlem Renaissance embraced literary, musical, performing, and visual arts.

The insurgent tip of a cultural and political spear, Harlem’s New Negro renaissance sought nothing less than to redefine African-Americans’ image, to themselves and others, by a clear demonstration of intellectual parity with the best and brightest the white world had to offer.

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A movement influencing movements as various as the Francophone Négritude poets, the Beat Movement and the Black Arts Movement—to mention only literary artists—the Harlem Renaissance has had an enormous impact on subsequent black creative expression and consciousness worldwide. Nor was the Harlem Renaissance confined to New York City. So-called 'New Negroes' could and did flourish in world capitals as far east as Paris and Berlin, and migrated from cities as far south as Washington, DC and Atlanta and as far west as Los Angeles. Artists from the Caribbean and Mexico City were also lured to Harlem, whose new subway system transformed Harlem into a virtual city within New York City, crowding in its heyday more black entertainers, composers, journalists, playwrights, poets, preachers and musicians into a six-square-mile radius than any other U.S. city. Harlem served as the symbolic capital of this African-American and black-diasporic cultural awakening.

A biographer, essayist, book reviewer and Spanish-English translator, Kevin Brown completed, in 2018, Countée, Ida Mommy & Me: A Family History of the Harlem Renaissance, an account of his maternal great-grandmother Ida Mae Roberson’s marriage to the poet Countée Cullen. Portions of that book have appeared or are forthcoming in the Chattahoochee Review, Fiction International and the Threepenny Review. Kevin Brown has authored or contributed to four books including Romare Bearden: Artist (1994); and Malcolm X: His Life and Legacy (1995). He served as contributing editor to the New York Public Library African American Desk Reference (2000). Brown studied with Gregory Rabassa, Gabriel García Márquez' translator, and translated Mexican author Efraín Bartolomé’s Ocosingo War Diary: Voices from Chiapas (2014). His articles on art, cinema, dance, literature, music and politics have appeared or are forthcoming in the Afterimage, Asymptote, the Brooklyn Rail, Hayden's Ferry Review, Kirkus, the Kansas City Star, the Nation, the London Times Literary Supplement and the Washington Post Bookworld, among many others. 

Presented in conjunction with the 2018 One Book, One San Diego selection is March: Book One by Congressman John Lewis, Andrew Aydin and Nate Powell.

Parking is underground and free with 2-hour validation. The Central Library is one block from the Park & Market stop on the Trolley Blue and Orange lines.  Bus routes 11 stops right in front of the library.