City Arts & Lectures

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Nikole Hannah-Jones has spent her career investigating racial inequality and injustice. She is the Pulitzer Prize-winning creator of The 1619 Project, an ongoing initiative from The New York Times Magazine that began in August 2019, the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. The project’s aim is to reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of Black Americans at the center of our national narrative. The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story is an expansion of this work of journalism, weaving together eighteen essays that explore the legacy of slavery in present-day America with thirty-six poems and works of fiction that illuminate key moments of oppression, struggle, and resistance. The essays show how the inheritance of 1619 reaches into every part of contemporary American society, from politics, music, diet, traffic, and citizenship to capitalism, religion, and our democracy itself. Contributors include Michelle Alexander, Sonia Sanchez, Reginald Dwayne Betts, Barry Jenkins, Yaa Gyasi, Ibram X. Kendi, Claudia Rankine, Bryan Stevenson, Jesmyn Ward, Lynn Nottage, Danez Smith, Yusef Komunyakaa, and many more.

Director, producer, and writer Barry Jenkins has received sweeping critical acclaim for his work, which notably depict black and queer experience through a nuanced and expressive lens. Moonlight (2016) received the Academy Award for Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay, as well as the Golden Globe Award for Best Picture. His adaptation of James Baldwin’s If Beale Street Could Talk (2019) was nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay at the Academy Awards, and The Underground Railroad, an HBO series based on Colson Whitehead’s novel of the same name, was nominated for five Primetime Emmy Awards in 2021. 

Jeff Chang is a journalist, music critic, and the author of Who We Be, Can’t Stop Won’t Stop, and We Gon’ Be Alright. He is the former Director of the Institute for Diversity in the Arts at Stanford University and currently serves as Vice President of Narrative, Arts, and Culture at Race Forward.

Forrest Hamer is a poet and a psychoanalyst. He is the author of several books of poetry, including Call & Response and his poems have been published in The American Poetry Review, the Kenyon Review, Callaloo,  Zyzzyva, and other journals. He has taught psychology and social welfare at the University of California, Berkeley.