About this Event
The Free Black Women's Library is a literary hub, reading room, Black Feminist archive, and community care space that features a free store, period pantry, backyard garden, reading club, weekly book swap, and a wide array of free public programs, as well as a collection of over 5000 books written by Black women and Black nonbinary authors.
This social art project was created by artist and cultural worker Akinmowo in 2015, and is funded by merchandise sales and direct donations.
Sustain her work by becoming a monthly patron at ❤️
The Free Black Women's Library
presents
A Natural History of the Spirits Book Release Celebration
with author Jori Lewis
Sunday, Nov 1
3PM - 4.30PM
A Natural History of the Spirits : On Ecology, Belonging, and the Sublime is a volume of interconnected essays that all explore the world of the invisible and unknowable by using elements of history, scientific research, myth, folklore, and cultural analysis and that roam from the prairies of Illinois to the mangroves of Senegal. Along the way, the book meditates on themes of colonialism, racism, social and ecological change, while also measuring the palpitations we feel in the face of heartbreak and hope, desire and distaste, grief and joy.
Authors Bio:
Jori Lewis writes narrative nonfiction that explores how people interact with their environments. Her reports and essays have been published in The Atlantic Magazine, Orion Magazine and The New York Review of Books, among others, and she is the editor in chief of Adi Magazine, a literary magazine of global politics. Her first book, Slaves for Peanuts: A Story of Conquest, Liberation, and a Crop That Changed History, won a Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant, a Silvers Grant, a James Beard media award, and the Harriet Tubman Prize. She was a 2019-2020 Scripps Fellow at the University of Colorado, Boulder and a 2024-2025 Knight Science Journalism Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
A Natural History of the Spirits published by New Press is her second book.
Event venue & nearby stays
The Free Black Women's Library Reading Room, 226 Marcus Garvey Blvd, Brooklyn, United States
Concerts, fests, parties, meetups — all the happenings, one place.