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Caryl Phillips to Read from His Award-Winning Novel Crossing the River, Oct 4
 Professor Caryl Phillips, the acclaimed novelist, playwright, screenwriter and scholar, will read from his award-winning novel Crossing the River on October 4th at 6 p.m. in Sulzberger Parlor.
Phillips, whom The New York Times calls "one of the literary giants of our time," has written about race, identity, and belonging in seven novels and three books of non-fiction. For almost 20 years, Phillips has been writing Africa back into the broken triangle of discourse - which he says has been reduced to "a two-lane highway" between Europe and the Americas - through his books, scholarly work, and mentoring of young writers here and abroad. Phillips' latest novel, A Distant Shore , won this year's Commonwealth Writers Prize, and tells a story of a friendship of two displaced persons in contemporary England: a retired schoolteacher and a survivor of a war-torn country in Africa.
 This fall, Phillips launched a new course, The Literature of the Middle Passage , which is a synthesis of classroom study of literature and travel to Africa. In class, students will have a chance to study Phillips and other seminal writers and learn about the effects of postcolonial racism on today's world. The course will culminate in a trip to Ghana, where the students will have a chance to meet some of the renowned Ghanaian writers they will study in the course, as well as visit evocative slave trade sites.
Phillips is Professor of English and Henry R. Luce Professor of Migration and Social Order, and Director of Initiatives in the Humanities at Barnard College. He also directs the Barnard Forum on Migration. Phillips is a recipient of numerous awards including the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Award, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. For more information, please e-mail mhand@barnard.edu, or call 212-854-3577.
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