Save the Date: April 25, 2025!

CAALS 2025 welcomes Percival Everett, winner of the 2024 National Book Award for Fiction

  

The Marygrove Conservancy is pleased to announce that the thirty-sixth guest in the Contemporary American Authors Lecture Series (CAALS) is the prolific novelist Percival Everett. He will deliver the Bauder Lecture at 8 pm on April 25, 2025. 

 

The winner of over a dozen major awards, Everett is the author of 24 novels,

including Erasure, the basis for the award-winning film American Fiction. His most recent novel, James, a New York Times best-seller, reinterprets Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of the runaway slave Jim. The Chicago Tribune calls Everett "our current Great American Novelist” and regards James as "a masterpiece that will help redefine one of the classics of American literature, while also being a major achievement on its own.” Publishers Weekly says that in Erasure Everett’s “talent is multifaceted, sparked by a satiric brilliance that could place him alongside Wright and Ellison as he skewers the conventions of racial and political correctness.” Everett is also praised for his short fiction and poetry. Among his recent works are Dr. No, which received the 2023 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award; The Trees, a finalist for the Booker Prize and the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award; and Telephone, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, James was shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize and on November 20, 2024 received the National Book Award for Fiction.  

 

Everett is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California.

​​

For more information, contact Frank Rashid: frankdrashid@outlook.com.

 

The Contemporary American Authors Lecture Series (CAALS)

Established in 1989, CAALS is an annual event bringing a nationally known African American author to our campus for a public lecture and class session or conversation. Through the generous support of corporate donors, foundations, advertisers, friends, Marygrove College alumni and Board of Trustees members, and the Lillian and Donald Bauder Endowment, the series has remained free and accessible to the entire metropolitan Detroit community. To date, over 10,000 people have attended the Friday night public readings to hear outstanding writers share their work, and thousands of Detroit area high school and college students as well as others in the Detroit community have studied these works and attended class sessions with guest authors in the series. Since 2020, thousands of others have viewed the livestreamed event via Detroit Public Television and PBS Books. 

​

The Contemporary American Authors Lecture Series and Defining Detroit, a program of the Institute for Detroit Studies at Marygrove, have brought to Detroit audiences the recipients of eleven MacArthur “Genius” Grants, ten National Book Awards, eight Guggenheim Fellowships, seven Pulitzer Prizes, five Pushcart Prizes, three Emmy Awards, and one Man Booker Prize. In addition, the two series have welcomed three U.S. Poets Laureate and one Presidential Inaugural Poet.