
Books | ConnCAT | Culture & Community | Science Park | Arts & Culture | Arts & Anti-racism | Kulturally Lit | Year of Baldwin
Top: Author Amelia Allen Sherwood. Bottom: LIT Fest Founder IfeMichelle Gardin and Rev. Kevin Ewing, the interim director of the International Festival of Arts & Ideas. Lucy Gellman Photos.
Just off Winchester Avenue, ConnCAT was coming to life. In a conference room upstairs, 8-year-old Egypt Robinson grabbed a magic marker and filled in the blue and yellow tips of a star, guided by the words of a literary luminary. Down the hall, Dexter Singleton wove through seven decades of Black literature, tying James Baldwin to Lorraine Hansberry, Aleshea Harris, Lynn Nottage and Jackie Sibblies Drury.
In the parking lot outside, poet Yex Diaz prepared to walk onto a stage, and transform the sprawling parking lot into hallowed ground. Beneath a nearby tent, author Barbara McClane looked up, and waited for the first words to drop.
Authors, artmakers, academics, activists, and avid readers came together Saturday, for the fifth annual Kulturally LIT Fest (formerly Elm City LIT Fest), celebrating writer, activist and intellectual James Baldwin on what would have been his hundredth birthday. Held at the Connecticut Center for Arts & Technology (ConnCAT) for the first time in its history, the festival lifted up Baldwin's long legacy, from his cutting and prescient critique of America to how to teach his work today.
The fest is part of The Year of Baldwin, a months-long centennial celebration that also includes Baldwin reading groups and book clubs, film screenings, poetry readings, theater performances and over a dozen community collaborators. Read more about that here and here.
"I feel like we have evolved—it's more enriching every year," said Kulturally LIT Founder IfeMichelle Gardin, who has grown the festival from a fledgling idea and neighborhood book club to an annual cultural event. "To have it at ConnCAT—this is the dream. I'm so glad it's here."
Alexis Willoughby-Robinson and her daughter, Egypt Robinson.
Around her, the building and parking lot came alive with panels, workshops, performances and vendors, bringing Baldwin out onto Winchester Avenue and into a space that has become a haven for young Black artists. As panelists gathered to revisit Baldwin's female characters in one room, artists Jasmine Nikole and Empress Arce set up shop in another, laying several of Baldwin's words out on bright, neon-colored index cards.
"Colour is not a human or a personal reality; it is a political reality," read one flashcard on the table, taking it back to Baldwin's The Fire Next Time. "Do I really want to be integrated into a burning house?," read another.
As they welcomed pint-sized attendees and parents alike into the space, both artists said they were excited to be there. When Gardin first reached out to Nikole and Arce about the festival, they designed a series of crafts that allowed people to engage with Baldwin's words, from bookmark making to small wooden signs that they could color and decorate.
Egypt, who is currently on a six-pointed star (and, she said, Elephant & Piggie) kick, gravitated towards a set of magic markers and got to work.
"James Baldwin has a special place in my heart," Arce said, adding that their favorite works are If Beale Street Could Talk and Baldwin’s essay, The Fire Next Time. "His books really speak to me—they make me feel like I'm not alone."
Baldwin's spirit was guiding them Saturday, they added. "When I do something for the next generation, it makes me feel like he's with me."
Nile and nico okoro, with Amelia Allen Sherwood and Leona-Naomi.
In an alcove just across the hall, it seemed that his spirit was also alive and well. Surrounded by kids, author and educator Amelia Allen Sherwood set up a Montessori learning corner with flashcards, puzzles, books, and copies of her new book series, Mae We Be Free. Designed for early readers, the series centers and celebrates young Black characters, weaving in language that may be more familiar to Black kids than many of the books currently on the market.
Sherwood, who runs Sankofa Learning Center, began working on the series when she was home with her own young readers during 2020 lockdowns, and saw a need for characters who looked and spoke like they did. At the time, she was doing anti-bias, anti-racism work with Elm City Montessori School and reading with her sons, then 5 and 6, at home
"It was that critical moment when they were learning how to read," she remembered—and she discovered that characters and terminology were both overwhelmingly white.
"There are so many early readers out there, but they lack diversity and language," she continued. "This was birthed out of Covid and crisis learning."
The books themselves came together surprisingly quickly, perhaps proof that they had been gestating for some time. When she started writing, Sherwood blended her own background in Montessori education—and her lived experience as a mom and a Black woman—with language that felt more accessible to Black kids. For instance, she wove in the words sis, lit, and jam—words that are common in African American Vernacular English or AAVE, she said.
Markeshia Ricks and Lauren Anderson repping Possible Futures outside. The parking lot transformed into a vendor fair and stage for poetry and performance.
She also studied other early readers, from the popular Bob Books to The Learning Cove, which supported her as she wrote and published. She paired up with the Austin, Tex.-based illustrator Charlotte Dennis, who took the text—phrases like I love my kin and This is my pop and Go sis, Go!—and brought the words vibrantly to life. She worked with Books and Things, a Virginia-based publishing house, to midwife the book into the world.
Its release date is this week—making Lit Fest a perfect place to launch the book.
"It just fills me with so much joy," said attendee Hillary Bridges, who for years led Students for Educational Justice and now lives in Washington, D.C.. "These are going to babies in my life immediately."
As her daughter played with sight word flashcards, mom Jamilah Prince-Stewart said she's thrilled to have the books out in the world. As a kid, she remembered, she was obsessed with The Little Mermaid—but wanted an Ariel that looked like her. To get there, her family members filled in The Little Mermaid coloring sheets by hand, working painstakingly with brown markers. Now, her three-year-old daughter Leona-Naomi has a series of books where no parent will ever need to do that.
"It really does mean everything," said Prince-Stewart, watching Leona-Naomi as she put words together with nico okoro and her son, Nile, at a low, kid-sized table. "She sees herself now. To see her saying, 'Look, mommy, she has brown skin like me'—you can just see the confidence in her."
Writer and minister Ryan Lindsay with ConnCAT CEO and President (and now, student at the Yale Divinity School, which Lindsay also attended) Erik Clemons.
As he walked through the halls, ConnCAT CEO and President Erik Clemons called the festival a kind of full-circle moment. In 2019, "I still remember Ife conceiving the idea of Lit Fest," he said. At the time, Gardin had come into his office and presented Lit Fest as "a festival for Black People and Black books," immediately aligned with ConnCAT's mission of Black excellence.
Neither of them could have predicted that a global pandemic would bring gathering to a halt for years, upending life and community as New Haven understood it. To celebrate both the festival's growth and Baldwin's life, then, felt like a triumph twice over. Going forward, both he and Gardin hope to watch it grow into a blocks-long affair after ConnCAT Place on Dixwell is open.
Clemons added that Baldwin has had a profound impact on his own life and work as a Black man: it was reading The Fire Next Time that put words to the realities of American racism and white supremacy that he was already feeling. He was around 12 years old the first time he read the essay, to which he still returns.
"James Baldwin, for me, provided the language for what was happening to my people, but also what could be possible for us," Clemons said. "That last page [of The Fire Next Time] gives a warning to this country."
The section he is referring to is a call to action—to bring an end to what Baldwin recognized as the sickness of American racism. Now more than ever, perhaps, is time to heed it:
Everything now, we must assume, is in our hands; we have no right to assume otherwise. If we-and now I mean the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of the others--do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world. If we do not now dare everything, the fulfilment of that prophecy, recreated from the Bible in song by a slave, is upon us : God gave Noah the rainbow sign, No more water, the fire next time!
"We're All Unwell Until We Dismantle Those Systems"
Dexter Singleton, executive artistic director at Collective Consciousness Theatre and director of New Play Development at TheatreSquared, with poet and playwright Marcus Gardley. Gardley's biopic on James Baldwin will be out in the next two years.
Throughout the day, some of the most thought-provoking moments came from workshop facilitators and invited panelists, who ranged from theatermakers to literary critics to professors teaching Baldwin's work in their college classrooms.
In ConnCAT's large community room, Collective Consciousness Theatre (CCT) Executive Artistic Director Dexter Singleton and playwright Marcus Gardley discussed Baldwin's 1964 play Blues For Mister Charlie as a piece of theater history and powerful form of activism, so much so that it shook audiences with its segregated seating and recognition of racism as an American sickness when it opened 60 years ago.
And yet, both said, it is produced far less often than Baldwin's contemporaneous work The Amen Corner—to the detriment of audiences past and present.
The play, inspired by the murders of Emmett Till and another Black man in the American South, follows Richard Henry, a Black man who is murdered after allegedly flirting with a white shopkeeper's wife. In the work, Baldwin presents the audience with a cast of characters that feels chillingly familiar, from Henry himself to the left-leaning white character Parnell James, who is an ally until he's not.
Baldwin dedicated the work to civil rights leader Medgar Evers, who told him about the second murder in the early 1960s, and was assassinated in his driveway in 1963. After opening in April, it ran for under four months, closing in August. Baldwin wasn't deterred by the play's relatively short run: The Amen Corner opened at the Ethel Barrymore Theater months later.
"He was trying to do something that was pretty new for the times, in terms of what he wanted from the audience," said Singleton, who is also the director of new play development at TheatreSquared in Fayetteville, Arkansas. "It was a social experiment in a lot of ways, and one that had never been done before on Broadway."
Jacque Brown, herself a writer and producer, looks on as Singleton and Gardley speak.
Joining via Zoom, Gardley tried to contextualize the play, of which CCT and Kulturally LIT staged a reading at the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library earlier this year. At the time he wrote Blues for Mister Charlie, Baldwin was going through something of a personal reckoning himself: he had returned from almost a decade in Paris in 1957, and begun doing more work explicitly related to civil rights.
That fall, he made his first trip to the deep South, which resulted in the essay "A Letter From The South" for the Partisan Review and later, his 1961 collection of essays, Nobody Knows My Name. Edgars, Gardley explained, was essential to that work, as he was to the writer's understanding of the racism plaguing the region and the country.
"Him and Baldwin really shared that fearlessness," he said. The two, often in ideological lockstep, were not always in agreement with fellow civil rights leaders, and it caused tension within the movement. Evers' death, for which his killer walked free for 30 years, numbed Baldwin for a year, and then pushed him to speak more fiercely and frequently about civil rights, from his pages to public appearances at protests.
"I always wonder if there's a play in the car rides that the two of them took," Singleton said. "I don't think that's ever been explored in a play—these car rides where he [Evers] took him through the South, showed him these locations where work was happening ... to be a fly in the car, to hear those conversations between the two of them about Black America, where it could be, where it's going, where we are culturally in the country, is pretty amazing."
And yet, it was The Amen Corner that became a much produced and beloved hit (including here in New Haven in 1996). For Gardley, that's partly owing to the cast size and length of Blues For Mister Charlie—the work is three acts—but owing mostly to the content.
The show opened in the midst of protests around civil rights, including at the 1964 World's Fair (and one year after Baldwin was invited, then disinvited, to speak at the March on Washington). President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law six weeks into the run. Sit-ins continued long after, as de facto segregation, redlining, and the economic disenfranchisement of Black Americans continued across the country.
In other words, the show—then directed by Burgess Meredith with stars like Al Freeman, Jr. and Diana Sands— met the moment. But the play closed just a few months later.
Why, the two asked aloud? It's a play that brings together several themes—religion and faith, nonviolence versus physical self-defense, white allyship and its limits—that weren’t always fashionable to the mainstream civil rights movement. In addition to The Amen Corner, the 1960s also saw Baldwin grow close with members of the Black Panther Party, an affiliation that shaped his advocacy for Palestine and sharp-tongued criticisms of the police for the rest of his life. The play asks an audience to sit with all of that.
"There's always a profound question that he wants you to answer as an audience member, as a reader," Gardley said. "This is a man who was arguably the most profound literary mind of his day, and yet he was not allowed in certain spaces" because he was seen as too polemical.
Maybe for that reason, he continued, audiences—and theatermakers—can and should still learn from his work today. Gardley nodded to the Black playwrights for whom Baldwin (and Lorraine Hansberry, who died at just 34 in 1965) were literary trailblazers, a long list that includes Jackie Sibblies Drury, Lynn Nottage, Aleshea Harris, Dominique Morisseau, Whitney White, Nathan Louis Jackson, Tarell Alvin McCraney, Radha Blank and Ta-Nehisi Coates among many others.
He added that he often thinks about the role belief—against all odds—played in Baldwin's work. Even after reading and re-reading and analyzing Baldwin's writing, which can feel very heavy, he still thinks of the writer as an optimist.
"He didn't feel like people should give up on things because they felt impossible," he said, answering a question that had popped up in the back of the room. "He really felt like the only way to any sort of positive movement in the future is brutal honesty."
A few chairs shifted; the 1960s collided with the present. "That people had to declare how they felt. They had to speak how systems were functioning—patriarchy, white supremacy, misogyny—you had to speak them out and dismantle them. Unless these systems were dismantled, we would all be suffering."