Join us Thursday, September 26, at 8 pm, for the 54th annual Steloff Lecture delivered by novelist and playwright Darryl Pinckney. Pinckney will lecture and be awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters. He will respond to audience questions and will sign books following the presentation.

About Darryl Pinckney

Darryl Pinckney is a long time contributor to The New York Review of Books, the author of two novels, High Cotton (1992) and Black Deutschland (2016), and several works of nonfiction, including Out There: Mavericks of Black Literature (2002), Blackballed: The Black Vote and US Democracy (2014), and Busted in New York and Other Essays (2019). He has contributed to numerous other publications, including The Guardian, Harper’s, Los Angeles Times, The Nation, The New Republic, The New Yorker, the New York Times Book Review, The Paris Review, Slate, TLS,Vanity Fair, and Vogue. His several theatrical collaborations with director Robert Wilson have appeared internationally and at Brooklyn Academy of Music. His most recent book is Come Back in September: A Literary Education on West Sixty-Seventh Street, Manhattan.

About the Steloff Lecture

Skidmore’s annual Frances Steloff Lecture honors the work of a major literary figure. The Steloff Lecture series was established in 1967 at Skidmore by Frances Steloff, a native of Saratoga Springs, founder of the Gotham Book Mart in New York City, and well-known patron of writers. She endowed the lecture series as a way to bring outstanding literary and artistic talent to the college. Notable Steloff speakers have included five Nobel Prize winners and dozens of the world’s most important writers. Previous Steloff honorees include Mario Vargas Llosa, Nadine Gordimer, Seamus Heaney, J.M. Coetzee, Saul Bellow, Arthur Miller, Margaret Atwood, Zadie Smith, Colm Tóibín, Don DeLillo, Marilynne Robinson, John Banville, and Joyce Carol Oates, among many others.

The Steloff Lecture is presented by the English Department at Skidmore College and is free and open to the public.