Skip to Content

Crime/Scene: Ousmane K. Power-Greene on The Confessions of Matthew Strong with Elizabeth Nunez

October 11, 2022

Continuing our series on the power and potential of the thriller genre, The Center for Fiction welcomed Ousmane K. Power-Greene for a conversation on The Confessions of Matthew Strong. In this thought-provoking and suspenseful tale, Allegra Douglass is finally ready to tell her version of what happened with a white supremacist named Matthew Strong. From the beginning, Allie had the clues—found in possibly-connected disappearances of other young Black women; in a series of recently restored plantation homes; in letters outlining an uprising; in maps of slave trade routes and old estates; in hidden caves and buried tunnels; in a confessional that should never have existed—and then Allie herself disappears. In his incendiary story about race, redemption, the dangerous imbalances that continue to destabilize society, Power-Greene “shreds the pretense that America’s murderous history is a ‘whodunit’ and not a ‘wedunit’” (Paul Beatty). Author Elizabeth Nunez (Now Lila Knows) joined him in conversation.

Featuring

  • Ousmane Power-Greene 1 © Imanni Power-Greene - Eliana Cohen-Orth

    Ousmane K. Power-Greene

    Ousmane K. Power-Greene

    Ousmane K. Power-Greene is the Program Director of Africana Studies and an Associate Professor of History at Clark University. Power-Greene is the author of Against Wind and Tide: The African American Struggle Against the Colonization Movement, and his writing appears in The Harlem Renaissance Revisited: Politics, Arts, and Letters. He’s been featured on All Things Considered, C-SPAN Book TV, and NPR’s history podcast Throughline.

    Photo Credit: Imanni Power-Greene

  • ElizabethNunez_New - Claire Fennell

    Elizabeth Nunez

    Elizabeth Nunez

    Elizabeth Nunez is the award-winning author of a memoir and ten novels, four of them selected as New York Times Editors’ Choices. Anna In-Between won the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Award and was long-listed for an IMPAC Dublin International Literary Award. Nunez also received the 2015 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in nonfiction for Not for Everyday Use; an American Book Award; and a NALIS Lifetime Literary Award from the Trinidad and Tobago National Library. She is a cofounder of the National Black Writers Conference and executive producer of the CUNY-TV series Black Writers in America. Nunez is a Distinguished Professor at Hunter College, where she teaches fiction writing. She divides her time between Amityville and Brooklyn, New York.