Safiya Sinclair + Nicole Dennis-Benn: How to Say Babylon

Join us for an in-person event with award-winning writer Safiya Sinclair for the paperback release of her latest book How to Say Babylon. Joining Safiya in conversation is Nicole Dennis-Benn, author of Patsy and Here Comes the Sun. This event will be hosted in the Strand Book Store's 3rd floor Rare Book Room at 828 Broadway on 12th Street.

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STRAND IN-PERSON EVENT COVID-19 POLICY:

Masks and vaccination checks are not required for entry.* Attendees are welcome to wear a mask if they choose. If you do not have a mask and would like one, The Strand will provide masks at the door.

*Please note this is subject to change any time before or during the event per the author’s request.

ACCESSIBILITY:

Strand Book Store is an ADA compliant venue. The event space is accessible via elevator. Please ask a Strand employee upon arrival for directions to accessible seating if preferred.

ASL interpretation is available for this event by request only. Please reach out to our events team at [email protected] by June 26th to request.

For further information on accessibility in this space, or to make a request, please contact [email protected].

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National Book Critics Circle Award Winner

A New York Times Notable Book

Best Book of the Year for The Washington Post* The New Yorker * Time * The Atlantic * Los Angeles Times * NPR * Harper’s Bazaar * Vulture * Town & Country * San Francisco Chronicle * Christian Science Monitor * Mother Jones * Barack Obama

A Read with Jenna Today Show Book Club Pick

“Impossible to put down...Each lyrical line sings and soars, freeing the reader as it did the writer.” —People

With echoes of Educated and The Glass Castle, How to Say Babylon is a “lushly observed and keenly reflective chronicle” (The Washington Post), brilliantly recounting the author’s struggle to break free of her rigid religious upbringing and navigate the world on her own terms.

Throughout her childhood, Safiya Sinclair’s father, a volatile reggae musician and a militant adherent to a strict sect of Rastafari, was obsessed with the ever-present threat of the corrupting evils of the Western world outside their home, and worried that womanhood would make Safiya and her sisters morally weak and impure. For him, a woman’s highest virtue was her obedience.

Safiya’s extraordinary mother, though loyal to her father, gave her the one gift she knew would take Safiya beyond the stretch of beach and mountains in Jamaica their family called home: a world of books, knowledge, and education she conjured almost out of thin air. When she introduced Safiya to poetry, Safiya’s voice awakened. As she watched her mother struggle voicelessly for years under relentless domesticity, Safiya’s rebellion against her father’s rules set her on an inevitable collision course with him. Her education became the sharp tool to hone her own poetic voice and carve her path to liberation. Rich in emotion and page-turning drama, How to Say Babylon is “a melodious wave of memories” of a woman finding her own power (NPR).

Photo credit: Beowulf Sheehan

Safiya Sinclair was born and raised in Montego Bay, Jamaica. She is also the author of the poetry collection Cannibal, winner of a Whiting Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Metcalf Award, the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Poetry, and the Prairie Schooner Book Prize. Cannibal was selected as one of the American Library Association’s Notable Books of the Year, was a finalist for the PEN America Literary Award and the Seamus Heaney First Collection Poetry Prize in the UK, and was longlisted for the PEN Open Book Award and the Dylan Thomas Prize.

Sinclair’s other honors include winning the National Book Critics Circle Award, a Guggenheim fellowship, and fellowships from the Poetry Foundation, Civitella Ranieri Foundation, the Elizabeth George Foundation, MacDowell, Yaddo, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, TIME, Harper’s Bazaar, Granta, the Nation, and elsewhere. She is currently an associate professor of creative writing at Arizona State University

Photo credit: Ozier Muhammad

Nicole Dennis-Benn is an award-winning novelist whose books place working class Jamaicans, especially women, at the center of the universal human experience. Her debut novel, HERE COMES THE SUN, a New York Times Notable Book of 2016 and most recently, listed as a New York Times Most Notable Book of the decade, followed the lives of four women living in a fictional community in Montego Bay and explored timely themes of generational trauma, colorism, gender, class, and sexuality. Her second novel, Patsy, a Today Show Read with Jenna Book Club Pick and a New York Times Editor’s Choice, explored the lives of a mother and daughter grappling with immigration and identity. Dennis-Benn’s novels have been translated to multiple languages, including French, Portuguese, Korean, German and Italian, and are sold all over the globe. NPR has called Dennis-Benn an indispensable novelist whereas Time Magazine has described her stories as filling a literary void. While Dennis-Benn currently lives in NYC with her partner and two young sons, Jamaica is her muse.

Dennis-Benn was born and raised in Vineyard Town, Kingston, and is a graduate of St. Andrew High School for Girls. She holds a Bachelor of Science in Biology from Cornell University, Master of Public Health from the University of Michigan, and a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from Sarah Lawrence College. She regularly mentors emerging writers, with an emphasis on those from the Caribbean, through the Stuyvesant Writing Workshop, for which she is the Founding Director.