Darryl Pinckney on his memoir Come Back in September, with Thad Ziolkowski, May 2, 2023

Darryl Pinckney on his memoir Come Back in September
in conversation with Thad Ziolkowski
May 2, 6:30 pm, the Kelly Skylight Room, the Graduate Center, CUNY
Darryl Pinckney arrived at Columbia University in New York City in the early 1970s and had the opportunity to enroll in Elizabeth Hardwick’s creative writing class at Barnard. It changed his life. When the semester was over, he continued to visit her, and he became close to both Hardwick and Barbara Epstein, Hardwick’s best friend and neighbor and a fellow founder of The New York Review of Books. Pinckney was drawn into a New York literary world where he encountered some of the fascinating contributors to the Review, among them Susan Sontag, Robert Lowell, and Mary McCarthy. Yet the intellectual and artistic freedom that Pinckney observed on West Sixty-seventh Street could conflict with the demands of his politically minded family and their sense of the unavoidable lessons of black history.
In Come Back in September, Pinckney recalls his introduction to New York and to the writing life. The critic and novelist intimately captures this revolutionary, brilliant, and troubled period in American letters.
Darryl Pinckney is the author of two novels, High Cotton (1992), which won the Los Angeles Times award for First Fiction, and Black Deutschland (2016); and three other works of non-fiction, Out There: Mavericks of Black Literature(2002), which was awarded a Literature Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letter, Blackballed: The Black Vote and U.S. Democracy (2012), and Busted in New York and Other Essays (2019). He has been a Hodder Fellow at Princeton University, a Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library, a recipient of grants from the Whiting and Guggenheim foundations, and of a Harold D. Vursell Award for Distinguished Prose from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Deputy Director of the Leon Levy Center for Biography Thad Ziolkowski is the author the memoir On a Wave, which was a finalist for the PEN/Martha Albrand Award in 2003, and Wichita, a novel. His most recent book, The Drop, which explores the relationship between surfing and addiction, was published by HarperCollins in 2021. His essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, Slate, Bookforum, Artforum, Travel & Leisure, Interview Magazine and 4Columns. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and has a PhD in English Literature from Yale University.