2024 | HAUNTINGS

Sept. 20-21, 2024

Spotlight Speaker: Percival Everett

The organizers of the Buffalo Humanities Festival are delighted to announce author Percival Everett as the spotlight speaker of the 2024 Buffalo Humanities Festival: Hauntings (Sept. 20-21).

With the release of his 24^thnovel, James, a retelling of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from enslaved Jim’s perspective, Everett adds to an impressive list of titles. His most recent books include Dr. No (winner of the 2023 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award and finalist for the NBCC Award for Fiction), The Trees (finalist for the Booker Prize and the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award), Telephone (finalist for the Pulitzer Prize), So Much Blue, and I Am Not Sidney Poitier. Everett’s 2001 novel Erasure was adapted into the Oscar Award-winning (Best Adapted Screenplay) film American Fiction (2023). He has also written acclaimed short story and poetry collections.

‘Huck Finn’ Is a Masterpiece. This Retelling Just Might Be, Too.

Dwight Garner’s review title from The New York Times

Everett received the NBCC Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and the PEN Center USA Award for Fiction—among many other literary awards—and was also the recipient of a 2023 Windham Campbell Prize for Fiction. He is a Distinguished Professor of English at University of Southern California and lives in Los Angeles.

Please mark your calendars for what promises to be a stellar evening of conversation on Friday, Sept. 20, 2024. Follow us on social media or click here to sign-up for our mailing list and stay in the loop on all the details!

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2023 | COMMUNITIES: TRUST

Sept. 22-24, 2023

FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

What is the Buffalo Humanities Festival? An annual celebration of ideas, art, and activities featuring talks and panel discussions by scholars, artists, and community activists designed to provoke thought, spur new encounters, and introduce you to new friends in our city. This year’s festival celebrates our interdependence on one another. Join us as we explore topics on comfort food, indigenous languages, ecological loneliness, Black Studies in the university, human-animal bonds, prisons, policing, and renewable energy while keeping an eye on local landscapes from Love Canal to the Waterfront. By sharing our stories, histories, and art we hope to uncover how our interrelatedness binds us—and challenges us—as collectives, publics, neighborhoods, and families.

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[The festival program is available as a downloadable/viewable PDF, but please note that all information provided in the program is accessible as screen reader-friendly text on the individual schedule pages of the website. The PDF festival program is not tagged as an accessible document.]

PAST events

Black Utopias in a Post-Pandemic World

Thursday, November 19, 7pm [Zoom]

There is a powerful tradition of utopian practice and thought in African American communities. From black towns like Mound Bayou, Mississippi to the lyrical imaginings of Afrofuturism, Black utopias have been a potent response to racial inequality and suffering. At this moment of rupture, with the related crises of the pandemic, racial uprisings, climate change and economic decline, Black Utopian thought and practice offer alternative paths to the future. On Thursday, November 19 leading scholars and artists in the field of Afrofuturism and Black Utopia will engage in a conversation about the role Black Utopian thinking can play at this crucial moment.

• Convener and moderator: Victoria W. Wolcott, Professor of History, University at Buffalo;
• Julian C. Chambliss, Professor of English with an appointment in History and the Val Berryman Curator of History at the MSU Museum at Michigan State University;
• John Jennings, Professor of Media and Cultural Studies, UC Riverside;
• Alex Zamalin, Director of African American Studies and Assistant Professor of Political Science, University of Detroit, Mercy.

Presented through the generous support of Humanities New York.