I Saw Your Face: A Conversation on Tom Feelings

• Friday, September 20
• 2:00 PM
• Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library (lower level)
• 121 Wall Street. Room 38-39
• MAP
• FREE & OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

Author, artist, illustrator, cartoonist, and activist Tom Feelings once wrote, “When I am asked what kind of work I do, my answer is that I am a storyteller, in picture form, who tries to reflect and interpret the lives and experiences of the people that gave me life. When I am asked who I am, I say, I am an African who was born in America.” Kwame Dawes talks with journalist Gaiutra Bahadur about his collaborations with the late artist. A selection from the library’s Feelings archive will be on view.

Gaiutra Bahadur (Yale College ‘96) is the author of Coolie Woman, a personal history of indenture in the West Indies shortlisted for Britain's Orwell Prize for artful political writing. Her essays, criticism and reportage have appeared in a wide range of publications, including the New York Times Book Review, the New York Review of Books, the New Republic, The Nation, VQR, Lapham’s Quarterly, Boston Review and Dissent. She teaches journalism as an assistant professor in the Department of Arts, Culture and Media at Rutgers University-Newark. A former daily newspaper reporter and Nieman Fellow, she has published short fiction in the Feminist Press collection Go Home!. Her work has been recognized with literary residencies at the MacDowell Colony and the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center in Italy and fellowships from Harvard, the British Library and the New York Public Library. Twice winner of the New Jersey Council on the Arts Award for creative prose, she has taught creative nonfiction in Switzerland and Caribbean literature in New York City.