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TMS 25th Anniversary Celebration Kicks Off with Morrison and Soyinka Read In

This year the Toni Morrison Society celebrates its 25th Anniversary. To commemorate this milestone, the Society plans a year-long series of events that will focus on Toni Morrison’s impact on the humanities in the U.S. and abroad.

The first event will be an International Read-In on Wednesday, February 14th, to celebrate the two Black, living Nobel Laureates in Literature: Toni Morrison and Wole Soyinka. The Society invited organizations (universities, libraries, book clubs, book stores, faith and cultural communities) to participate in a read-in of their works. This special event will attract both Morrison and Soyinka readers from a multitude of disciplines and will truly reflect the solidarity and intellectual community each author continues to encourage and inspire.

Morrison’s and Soyinka’s reach and influence transcend boundaries and bring African American and African literature “from margin to center.” Morrison’s eleven critically acclaimed novels have been translated into twenty-six languages and have received the highest critical acclaim including the Books Critics Circle Award, the Pulitzer Prize, the Condorcet Medal, and the Nobel Prize for Literature. Her most recent collection of essays, The Origin of Others, encourages us to think globally and invites us to read her work in concert with other writers who help us to reconsider what it means to be an “other.” Wole Soyinka, the first Black Nobel Laureate in Literature, is a critically acclaimed Nigerian writer whose plays, memoirs, novels, and poetry collections have earned him the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Lifetime Achievement, the International Humanist Award, and the Benson Medal among other distinctions. His Nobel acceptance lecture, This Past Must Address Its Present, makes a bold case for universal suffrage and world peace in our time.

The impact of Morrison’s and Soyinka’s influence and achievement in all disciplines of the humanities has been distinctive and enduring. Scholars and teachers in art, philosophy, religion, anthropology, theater, history, literature, African American and African studies, and music use their work to educate and transform communities your organizations are in and support. Let’s celebrate Morrison and Soyinka by coming together and having a read-in on February 14, 2018.

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