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Award-winning author and cultural critic Sarah Ladipo Manyika introduces some of the most distinguished Black thinkers of our times, including Nobel Laureates Toni Morrison and Wole Soyinka, and civic leaders first lady Michelle Obama and Senator Cory Booker in her latest volume Between Starshine and Clay: Conversations from the African Diaspora. Many of the interviews originated on MoAD's virtual series Conversations Across the Diaspora launched in 2020. Join us as Sarah becomes the subject and acclaimed author Natalie Baszile becomes the interviewer for this in-person installment of the popular series.

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This program will take place in-person at MoAD, masks are required throughout the museum.

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Sarah Ladipo Manyika is a writer of novels, short stories, and essays translated into several languages. She is author of the best-selling novel In Dependence (2008) and the multiple shortlisted novel Like a Mule Bringing Ice Cream to the Sun (2016). She has had work published in Granta, The Guardian, Washington Post, and Transfuge, among others. Manyika serves as board chair for the women’s writing residency, Hedgebrook; she was previously board director for the Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco, and has been a judge for the Goldsmiths Prize, California Book Awards, Aspen Words Literary Prize, and chair of judges for the Pan-African Etisalat Prize. Sarah is a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. Her most recent book is Between Starshine and Clay: Conversations from the African Diaspora.

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Natalie Baszile is the author of the novel, Queen Sugar, which is beingadapted for a seventh television season by writer/director Ava DuVernay, andco-produced by Oprah Winfrey. Queen Sugar was named one of the SanFrancisco Chronicles’ Best Books of 2014, was long-listed for the CrooksCorner Southern Book Prize, and nominated for an NAACP Image Award. In her newnon-fiction book, We Are Each Other’s Harvest: Celebrating AfricanAmerican Farmers, Land & Legacy, Natalie brings together essays, poems,conversations, portraits, and first-person narratives to tell the story ofBlack people’s connection to the land from Emancipation to the present. Nataliehas had residencies at the Ragdale Foundation, Virginia Center for the Arts,Hedgebrook, and the Djerassi Resident Arts Program where she received theSFFILM and the Bonnie Rattner Fellowships. Her non-fiction work has appeared inNational Geographic, The Bitter Southerner, O, The OprahMagazine, and a number of anthologies. Natalie lives in San Francisco.

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