Freedom: Essays with author Zinzi Clemmons

Join Zinzi Clemmons in conversation on her latest essay collection, Freedom, a radically vulnerable and virtuosic inquiry into the pursuit of freedom and the interminable nature of struggle. Co-presented by Litquake, San Francisco's Literary Festival and MoAD.

Weaving personal reflections with piercing insight and expansive vision across nine brilliant essays, Zinzi Clemmons explores the complexities of the elusive concept of freedom. In a deft mix of memoir, family history, criticism, and reportage, drawing on a vast range of material from Joan Didion to James Baldwin, political analysis and history to Clemmons’s own experiences across the globe, Freedom is an incendiary exploration of race, sex, class, and inheritance. In elegiac prose, Clemmons trains her discerning eye on American institutions and mythologies, probing the bounds of liberation and autonomy to interrogate our most enduring quest—the relentless pursuit of freedom for all.

“Freedom positions Zinzi Clemmons as one of the United States’ preeminent thinkers on justice. Her voice and vision fill me with gratitude.”
—Myriam Gurba, author ofCreep: Accusations and Confessions

About the Speakers

Zinzi Clemmons was raised in Philadelphia by a South African mother and an American father. Her debut novel, What We Lose (Viking 2017), was named “Debut Novel of the Year” by Vogue, and received praise from the Atlantic, the Guardian, the New York Times, The New Yorker, and others. What We Lose was a finalist for the Aspen Words Literary Prize, the California Book Award, a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Leonard Prize. It was longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize, and the International Dublin Literary Award. She is a 2017 National Book Award 5 Under 35 Honoree. She wrote the foreword to a new edition of Jean Toomer’s Cane, published by Penguin Classics in 2019. She serves as Director of Creative Writing at The University of California, Davis.