Rachel Cohen

I'm very happy to have a chance to revisit the endlessly interesting relationship between James Baldwin and his mentor Beauford Delaney (above is Delaney's painting Can Fire in the Park, 1946.)  In April, I'll be reading and presenting in what promises to be a wonderful festival honoring Baldwin's legacy.  Presented by New York Live Arts, which grows out of the Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane dance company, and curated by Lawrence Weschler, this year's festival runs from April 23-April 27 and is called James Baldwin, This Time!!  Participants include Bill T. Jones, Jamaica Kincaid, Nikky Finney, Kathleen Chalfant, Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, Suzan-Lori Parks, Colm Toibin, Yusef Komunyakaa, and many more.  

The festival's description of the event in which I'll be participating is as follows:

Rachel Cohen, whose critically acclaimed A Chance Meeting braids a sequence of seminal encounters across American cultural history, including Baldwin’s with both Richard Avedon and Norman Mailer, will read from a third chapter, focusing on the young writer’s life-transforming encounter with the sublime painter Beauford Delaney, at the latter’s Greenwich Village apartment. Following her reading, Cohen will engage Diedra Harris-Kelley, Co-Director of the Romare Bearden Foundation and Baldwin and Delaney biographer David Leeming, in a conversation about Delaney’s enduring importance in Baldwin’s life.

Festival information:

http://www.newyorklivearts.org/liveideas2014/

Event information:

http://www.newyorklivearts.org/liveideas2014/baldwin-avedon-delaney/