Celebrate All Fairfax Reads!

Celebrate Fairfax County Public Library's new series: All Fairfax Reads. Fairfax County Public Library is hosting events and a county-wide read of author and civil rights activist James Baldwin's classic 1953 novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, in celebration of the 100th anniversary of James Baldwin's birth.

Discuss Go Tell It on the Mountain

Join us and George Mason University Professor Keith Clark for a discussion of James Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain. The classic novel chronicles a fourteen-year-old boy's discovery of the terms of his identity as the stepson of the minister of a storefront Pentecostal church in Harlem one Saturday in March of 1935. Baldwin's rendering of his protagonist's spiritual, sexual, and moral struggle of self-invention opened new possibilities in the American language and in the way Americans understand themselves.

Can't attend this book discussion? Join us on Thursday, October 17. Learn more.

Want to check out the ebook version of Go Tell It on the Mountain? The ebook will be available without a wait through September 30. Download here.

About Keith

Keith Clark is a Distinguished University Professor at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. He is a member of the department of English and an affiliate faculty in the program in African and African American Studies. He is the author of Black Manhood in James Baldwin, Ernest J. Gaines and August Wilson (University of Illinois Press, 2002), The Radical Fiction of Ann Petry (Louisiana State UP, 2013), and editor of Contemporary Black Men's Fiction and Drama (Illinois, 2001). His last book, Navigating the Fiction of Ernest J. Gaines: A Roadmap for Readers, was published by Louisiana State and was runner-up for the 2021 C. Hugh Holman Award for the best book in southern studies. His essays and reviews have in appeared in such publications as African American Review, Callaloo, Gay and Lesbian Quarterly, and Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology. His most recent essay, “Rootlessness: Afro-Pessimism as Foundation in Paradise,” was published last year in The Bloomsbury Handbook to Toni Morrison. His teaching and scholarly interests include Black Literary Masculinity Studies, African American Drama, and African American LGBTQ Literature and Criticism.

Invite

This program is appropriate for ages 16+.