Event Recording
In conversation with Shana L. Redmond
September 27, 2025
“There is something valuable about wanting the world around you to know how richly you are being moved, so that maybe some total stranger might encounter your stomp, your clap, your shout, and find themselves moved in return,” writes the poet and cultural critic Hanif Abdurraqib.
Join Abdurraqib and scholar Imani Perry for a revelatory conversation through music as they invite the audience to listen along to a selection of songs reflecting the pulsing, resilient consciousness of their own art-making and its most personal inspirations.
“Music grows with the tide of social and political upheaval, resistance, and expansion,” Perry writes. “But the melancholy and blues sensibility are always there. One step forward, two steps back; three steps forward, two steps back. The music, in some sense, takes on both the possibility and terrible choreography that are part of the American project.”
This event was co-presented by Multicultural BRIDGE. WIT Literary Festival livestreams and recordings were produced by CTSB with promotional support from The Nation.
Learn more about WIT 2025 here.
Hanif Abdurraqib is a poet, essayist, and cultural critic. His latest book, There is Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension, won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2025. His recent collection of essays, A Little Devil in America (2021), was the winner of the Carnegie Medal and the Gordon Burns Prize and a finalist for the National Book Award. His first collection of essays, They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us (2017), was named one of the best books of the year by NPR, O Magazine, Pitchfork, and others. Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest (2019) was a New York Times bestseller, and his books of poetry include The Crown Ain’t Worth Much (2016) and Vintage Sadness (2017). The recipient of a 2021 MacArthur Foundation grant, he is a graduate of Beechcroft High School and lives in Columbus, Ohio.
Imani Perry won the National Book Award in 2022 for South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation. Her most recent book is Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People (2025). She is also the author of Breathe: A Letter to My Sons (2019); Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry (2018), for which she received the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography, The Phi Beta Kappa Christian Gauss Award, the Lambda Literary Award and the Shilts-Grahn Award; and May We Forever Stand: A History of the Black National Anthem (2018), which won the 2019 John Hope Franklin Book Award. She is a professor in African American Studies and in the Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University.
Shana L. Redmond is the author of Anthem: Social Movements and the Sound of Solidarity in the African Diaspora (2014) and Everything Man: The Form and Function of Paul Robeson (2020), which received a 2021 American Book Award. The co-editor of Critical Ethnic Studies: A Reader (2016) and the ongoing series Phono: Black Music and the Global Imagination, she has published chapters, articles, and essays in outlets including The Futures of Black Radicalism, Current Musicology, and Black Camera, as well as NPR, the BBC, Boston Review, and Mother Jones. Her work with artists and labels includes the critical liner essay to the soundtrack vinyl release for Jordan Peele’s film Us (2019) and the notes for String Quartets, Nos. 1-12 by Wadada Leo Smith (2022), Nina Simone’s You’ve Got to Learn (2023), and the multi-volume Paul Robeson: Voice of Freedom (2024). A Guggenheim Fellow and Grammy nominee, she is a Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.
