The Fall 2022 Barbara & David Zalaznick Reading Series premieres with a reading by award winning writer NoViolet Bulawayo.

NoViolet Bulawayo—Channeling the potent rhythms of the storytellers who raised her in Zimbabwe, NoViolet Bulawayo weaves stories that are at once disarmingly playful and devastatingly real. Her debut novel, We Need New Names, identified her as one of the great storytellers of displacement and arrival. “Nearly as incisive about the American immigrant experience as it is about the failings of Mugabe’s regime” (NPR), it was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize—marking the first time a Black woman from Africa received this recognition— and won the PEN/Hemingway Prize, the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and many other honors. With her second novel Glory, Bulawayo establishes herself as a new and essential voice in the fiction of the contemporary African diaspora. Inspired by the 2017 coup that ousted Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe’s leader of nearly four decades, the novel is a "a satire with sharper teeth, angrier, and also very, very funny” (The New York Times Book Review), populated by a chorus of animals who unveil the ruthlessness required to uphold the illusion of absolute power and the imagination. Although Zimbabwe is the immediate inspiration for this thrilling story, Glory resonates in a time of global clamor, with resistance movements across the world challenging different forms of oppression and giving voice to the bulletproof optimism to overthrow it completely. The most translated author in modern Zimbabwean history, Bulawayo grew up in Zimbabwe and earned her MFA from Cornell University, where she was a recipient of the Truman Capote Fellowship. She has also held fellowships at Princeton, Harvard, and Stanford.

We are proud to partner with Buffalo Street Books at this event. Buffalo Street Books is Ithaca’s community-owned cooperative bookstore, dedicated to re-imagining the ways an independent bookstore can serve its community. NoViolet Bulawayo’s books are available online, in store, and on site at the reading. Show your student ID at BSB and get 10% off every day!

Order online here:

Glory by NoViolet Bulawayo

We Need New Names by NoViolet Bulawayo

Book signing to follow.

FREE & OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

Currently on Cornell's campus, masking is encouraged but not required.

Please check Cornell's up to date COVID-19 policy for visitors to campus here.

This event is presented by the Department of Literatures in English / Creative Writing Program at Cornell University

Photo credit: Nye Lyn Tho