Ours is a real literary gem. It illuminates a greater understanding of what it means to be human and the complex, tangled lives and afterlives of enslavement. As the Guardian review put it: Hidden and enchanted, the town of Ours – founded by a woman called Saint – reflects wider truths about US black history. Phillip B. Williams is from Chicago, Illinois, and is the author of two collections of poetry, Thief in the Interior and Mutiny. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Boston Review, Callaloo, The Kenyon Review, The New Republic, The New Yorker, and elsewhere. A nominee for an NAACP Image Awards in poetry, he received several prestigious prizes for his work and serves as a faculty member at the New York University MFA program and Randolph College low-residency MFA. Currently, he is a Picador fellow at Leipzig University.

The event is moderated by PD Dr. Julia Nitz (https://blogs.urz.uni-halle.de/julianitz/). The reading will be followed by an informal conversation with the author over some Tinto de Verano.