Save the Date: April 28!

CAALS 2023 welcomes Robert Jones, Jr.

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The Marygrove Conservancy is

pleased to announce that the

thirty-fourth guest in the

Contemporary American Authors

Lecture Series (CAALS) is novelist

and essayist Robert Jones, Jr.

Jones--not to be confused with

Detroit’s great storyteller and

musician Rev. Robert B. Jones, Sr.--

is the author of The New York Times

bestselling novel The Prophets and

the creator of the social justice media community, Son of Baldwin. He will deliver the Bauder Lecture at Marygrove at 8 pm on April 28, 2023.

Register for the lecture or watch via Facebook or YouTube.

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The Prophets won the 2022 Publishing Triangle Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction and the 2022 NAIBA Book of the Year Award for Fiction. It was also a finalist for the 2021 National Book Award for Fiction and was named one of the best books of 2021 by Time, Entertainment Weekly, USA Today, The Boston Globe, and The Washington Post, among others. His writings have been featured in The New York Times, Essence, and The Paris Review, as well as in the critically acclaimed anthologies Four Hundred Souls and The 1619 Project.

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Listen to Jones's interview with NPR's Scott Simon.

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Join a virtual or an in-person discussion group or writing workshop centered on The Prophets: Click here.

Reserve a book club kit. Click here.

 

CAALS is supported by the Michigan Arts and Culture Council and the Lillian and Don Bauder Endowment.

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

 

The Contemporary American Authors Lecture Series (CAALS)

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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. 

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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.