Story/Teller

Story/Teller with Walter Mosley, Leon Addison Brown, and Jamia Wilson

Free

Online Event

Wednesday, 7:30 pm EDT September 23, 2020

Story/Teller features actors reading from new works of fiction to give audiences a taste of the language, characters, and story, followed by moderated conversations with the authors. See events in series.

Prolific stage and screen actor Leon Addison Brown will perform a dramatic reading from The Awkward Black Man (Grove Press), an exceptional short story collection by narrative craftsman and beloved multi-genre author Walter Mosley. The seventeen stories are brilliant, vivid character studies featuring black men struggling to move through the world and navigating relationships.

Jamia Wilson, executive director and publisher of Feminist Press, will join Mosley in conversation after the reading.

Featuring

Walter Mosley

Walter Mosley

Walter Mosley is the author of more than fifty critically acclaimed books, including the major bestselling mystery series featuring Easy Rawlins. His work has been translated into twenty-five languages and includes literary fiction, science fiction, political monographs, and a young adult novel. In 2013, he was inducted into the New York State Writers Hall of Fame, and he is the winner of numerous awards, including an O. Henry Award, the Mystery Writers of America’s Grand Master Award, a Grammy, PEN America’s Lifetime Achievement Award, and an Edgar Award. He lives in New York City.
Leon Addison Brown

Leon Addison Brown

Leon Addison Brown is an actor, best known for A Walk Among the Tombstones, Music of the Heart, Mo’ Better Blues, and True Blood. Other film credits include Lincoln, Whirlygirl, Hamlet, and The Associate. Theatre credits include his Broadway debut as Adam in Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me (Booth Theatre), Buster in Misery (Broadhurst Theatre), Ludie Watts in The Trip to Bountiful (Stephen Sondheim Theatre), and Ron/Bailiff/Luke/Tommy/Others in On the Waterfront (Brooks Atkinson Theatre); and Off-Broadway, as Nukain in The Painted Rocks at Revolver Creek and Simon Hanabe in The Train Driver (Romulus Linney Courtyard), Sylvester Malone/Jackson Hall in The Orphans’ Home Cycle Part III/I and Hambone in Two Trains Running (Peter Norton Space), Mickey in The Day the Bronx Died (American Jewish Theatre), Man in Chair/Scab #3 in The Lights (Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater), and part of the Ensemble in The Alexander Plays…Suzanne In Stages (Public Theater).
Jamia Wilson

Jamia Wilson

Jamia Wilson is the executive director and publisher of the Feminist Press, an independent, nonprofit literary publisher that promotes freedom of expression and social justice.

Featured Book

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The Awkward Black Man

By Walter Mosley

Published by Grove Press

PURCHASE

Mosley presents distinct characters as they struggle to move through the world in each of these stories–heroes who are awkward, nerdy, self-defeating, self-involved, and, on the whole, odd. He overturns the stereotypes that corral black male characters and paints a subtle, powerful portrait of each of these unique individuals. In “The Good News Is,” a man’s insecurity about his weight gives way to a serious illness and the intense loneliness that accompanies it. Deeply vulnerable, he allows himself to be taken advantage of in return for a little human comfort in a raw display of true need. “Pet Fly,” previously published in the New Yorker, follows a man working as a mailroom clerk for a big company—a solitary job for which he is overqualified—and the unforeseen repercussions he endures when he attempts to forge a connection beyond the one he has with the fly buzzing around his apartment. And “Almost Alyce” chronicles failed loves, family loss, alcoholism, and a Zen approach to the art of begging that proves surprisingly effective.

Touching and contemplative, each of these unexpected stories offers the best of one of our most gifted writers.

About this series

Story/Teller

Our Story/Teller series features actors reading from new works of fiction to give audiences a taste of the language, characters, and story, followed by moderated conversations with the authors.

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