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Event Overview

The African American Museum in Philadelphia, alongside the Moonstone Arts Center and the Scribe Video Center, is hosting a three-part event in tribute to the award-winning novelist and poet who brought forth the prominent issues on race and identity into the american literary mainstream. The event will first begin with a showing of “The Foreigner’s Home” which then moving onto a conversation between Sonia Sanchez and Louis Massiah. The event ends with a reading of Moonstone’s newest anthology, “Remembering Toni Morrison,” which focuses read by various collaborators of the chapbook.

Toni Morrison was a novelist, essayist, children’s writer, and an English professor. Song of Solomon won the National Book Critics Circle Award and Beloved won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. In 1993, she received the Nobel Prize in Literature, making her the first woman of African descent to win the prize.

“We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.”

The Foreigner’s Home explores Toni Morrison’s artistic and intellectual vision through “The Foreigner’s Home,” her 2006 exhibition at the Louvre Museum in Paris. Through exclusive footage we observe Morrison in dialogue with artists, most prominently, writer Edwidge Danticat, as the discussion of “foreignness” extends beyond the urgent questions of migration in the Americas, Europe, and in the Middle East, and explores art’s crucial role in comprehending the human problems that surround such questions. The film features extensive archival still and motion pictures of American and international topics and events basic to Morrison’s vision—from slavery to the blues, from Hurricane Katrina to the current migration crisis in the Middle East and Europe.

Speakers:

Sonia Sanchez is a poet, activist, scholar; the Laura Carnell Professor of English and Women’s Studies at Temple University; recipient of both the Robert Frost Medal for distinguished lifetime service to American poetry and Langston Hughes Poetry Award; one of the most important writers of the Black Arts Movement; the author of sixteen books including Like the Singing Coming off the Drums, Does Your House Have Lions?, Wounded in the House of a Friend, and Shake Loose My Skin.

Louis Massiah is an independent filmmaker who explores historical and political subjects. Massiah is a graduate of Cornell University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, receiving a degree in documentary film-maker. His producing and directing credits include Trash (1985), Louise Alone Thompson Patterson: In Her Own Words (2002), and more. He also produced two films for the PBS series, Eyes on the Prize II (1990). In addition to his film work, Massiah founded the Scribe Video Center, a West Philadelphia-based media arts organization that provides training and equipment access to emerging filmmakers and community organizations.

Remembering Toni Morrison is an anthology published by Moonstone Arts Center in remembrance of her life and legacy to overcoming adversity and raising awareness for issues and cultures mainstream media had once ignored. A collection of poetry written by poets and authors all around the nation, Remembering Toni Morrison is a testament to her reach and sheer presence as both a writer and public figure for black literature.

The Book will be available for sale during the event for $10.