The New York Times Magazine’s award-winning “1619 Project” issue, published in August 2019, reframed our understanding of American history by placing slavery and its continuing legacy at the center of our national narrative. In a dramatic expansion of this groundbreaking work of journalism, The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story, led by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, the inaugural Knight Chair in Race and Journalism at Howard University’s Cathy Hughes School of Communications, and the founder of Howard’s Center for Journalism and Democracy, along with an editorial team from the Times, offers a profoundly revealing vision of the American past and present. This new book weaves together eighteen essays that explore the legacy of slavery in present-day America with thirty-six poems and works of fiction that illuminate key moments of oppression, struggle, and resistance. The essays show how the inheritance of 1619 reaches into every part of contemporary American society, from politics, music, diet, traffic, and citizenship to capitalism, religion, and our democracy itself.

The book’s essays, fiction, and poetry are authored by Prof. Hannah-Jones, Matthew Desmond, Ph.D. (FAN ’16), Bryan Stevenson (FAN ’15 and ’16), Ibram X. Kendi, Ph.D. (FAN ’18 and ’19), Eve L. Ewing (FAN ’18), Jason Reynolds (FAN ’20), and Jesmyn Ward (FAN ’17), among many others.

Prof. Hannah-Jones will be in conversation with historian and award-winning, bestselling author Carol Anderson, Ph.D. (FAN ’21), the Charles Howard Candler Professor and Chair of African American Studies at Emory University. FAN hosted Prof. Anderson in May 2021 in support of her book The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America. Prof. Anderson contributed an essay to The 1619 Project.

FAN is honored to welcome special guest Claudia Rankine, who will offer a reading during the event. Rankine is the author of five books of poetry, including Citizen: An American Lyric and Don’t Let Me Be Lonely; three plays including HELP, which premiered in March 2020 (The Shed, NYC), and The White Card, which premiered in February 2018 (ArtsEmerson/ American Repertory Theater) and was published by Graywolf Press in 2019; as well as numerous video collaborations. Her recent collection of essays, Just Us: An American Conversation, was published by Graywolf Press in 2020. She is also the co-editor of several anthologies including The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind. Among her numerous awards and honors, Rankine is the recipient of the Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry, the Poets & Writers’ Jackson Poetry Prize, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, United States Artists, and the National Endowment of the Arts. A former Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, Rankine teaches in New York University’s Creative Writing Program.