"I Had to Go to Howard": A Homecoming Book Talk & Signing with Erik Mohn

"I Had to Go to Howard": A Homecoming Book Talk & Signing with Erik Mohn

"I had to go to Howard."

Every alum has a version of that sentence. Erik Mohn's took a whole memoir: a Black kid adopted into a white family in small-town Massachusetts, raised to believe love was enough, who came to the Mecca looking for a mirror.

He arrived on the Yard in August 2005. Before he left, Barack Obama had taken the oath of office across town — and Erik had been there for all of it, from the long run-up through the campaign and election night on campus to the inauguration itself. Ask anyone who was here then. They can still tell you exactly where they were standing.

Stranger in My Own Story is his debut memoir — adoption, Black identity, and hip-hop as the first language he had for grief, for anger, for belonging. Howard is where the story turns.

This Homecoming Week he's coming back to talk about it with fellow alum Jahi Whitehead of the Urban One Podcast Network: what he came looking for, what it cost him, and what this place gave him.

Current students, come. Erik sat where you're sitting, and he hadn't figured any of it out yet either.

Free and open to everyone. Pick up your copy at the Campus Store and get it signed that night.

RSVP so we know how many chairs to set out.