Lit Chat Interview with Author and Filmmaker Morgan Jerkins

A Daughter of the Great Migration Reclaims Her Roots

New York Times bestselling and National Magazine Award-winning author Morgan Jerkins will be at the Main Library this October to discuss Wandering in Strange Lands, the powerful story of her journey to understand her northern and southern roots, the Great Migration, and the displacement of black people across America. She will be the first featured Lit Chat author in the Library's new African American History series of community programs.

The project, in part, seeks to expand the Library's African American History Collection and the associated Digital Community Archive and to make customers aware of all the FREE family research and local history resources available to them in the Special Collections Department at the Main Library, including the newly-expanded Memory Lab.

For more information about how you can contribute materials to Special Collections or use these publicly-available resources to trace your family roots, research the history of your home or neighborhood and more, please click on this link.

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Morgan Jerkins's most recent book is the novel Caul Baby, an Amazon Best Book of 2021. Her other books are Wandering in Strange Lands: A Daughter of the Great Migration Reclaims Her Roots, one of Time’s must-read books of 2020, and This Will Be My Undoing: Living at the Intersection of Black, Female, and Feminist in (White) America, a New York Times Bestseller.

As a journalist, she’s written about the internet, intersecting social issues and popular media through celebrity profiles and interviews, reportage, commentary, and personal essays. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, and Vanity Fair, among others. She’s won two National Magazine Awards and was a Forbes 30 Under 30 Leader in Media.

Jerkins is also a filmmaker. Her debut short film, Black Madonna, which she wrote and co-directed, was selected at the Big Apple Film Festival, Pan African Film & Arts Festival, and NewFilmmakers Los Angeles. She teaches Creative Writing at Princeton University, where she also holds a Bachelor’s in Comparative Literature. She has an MFA from Bennington College, and has taught at Columbia University, Pacific University, The New School, and Leipzig University, where she was the Guest Picador Professor. Based in New York City, she was born and raised in New Jersey.

Interviewer Prof. Tammy Cherry has taught at Florida State College at Jacksonville as an English professor for 22 years. Along with composition classes, Tammy teaches African American literature and honors classes. She is a lifelong Jacksonville resident and recently served as co-host for the WJCT podcast Bygone Jax.

Praise for Morgan Jerkins's Books

“In Morgan Jerkins’s remarkable debut essay collection, This Will Be My Undoing, she is a deft cartographer of black girlhood and womanhood. From one essay to the next, Jerkins weaves the personal with the public and political in compelling, challenging ways... With this collection, she shows us that she is unforgettably here, a writer to be reckoned with.” — Roxanne Gay

“[A] forthright and informative account. . . . Jerkins’s careful research and revelatory conversations with historians, activists, and genealogists result in a disturbing yet ultimately empowering chronicle of the African-American experience. Readers will be moved by this brave and inquisitive book.” — Publishers Weekly on Wandering in Strange Lands

“Morgan Jerkins’ fantastic, expansive novel of mothers and daughters and Harlem, Caul Baby, is a meditation on the limits of inheritance and legacy. It’s also a love letter to a rapidly changing neighborhood.”— Kaitlyn Greenidge

Check out Morgan’s works from the library!

Continue Reading

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MORGAN RECOMMENDS

• Girl, Woman, Other by Bernadine Evaristo
• Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward
• In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado
• FEM by Magda Carneci

THE LIBRARY RECOMMENDS

• Dear Ijeawele, or, A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie 
• Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower by Brittney Cooper 
• Life, I Swear: Intimate Stories From Black Women on Identity, Healing, and Self-Trust by Chloe Dulce Louvouezo 
• A Renaissance of Our Own: A Memoir & Manifesto on Reimagining by Rachel E Cargle 
• Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine 
• The Love Song of W.E.B. Du Bois by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers 
• These Ghost are Family by Maisy Card 
• Neighbors and Other Stories by Diane Oliver 
• The Revisioners by Margaret Wilkerson Sexton 

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