Percival Everett to open Buffalo Humanities Festival

Percival Everett, the Pulitzer Prize finalist whose most recent novel, “James,” has been longlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize, is the spotlight speaker opening this year’s Buffalo Humanities Festival, a two-day event with the theme “Hauntings.”

Everett will give a reading from “James” and discuss his career as a novelist, poet and story writer, including his books, “Erasure,” (the basis of the Academy Award-winning film “American Fiction”), “I Am Not Sidney Poitier” and “The Trees,” which was shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize.

“James” is an adaptation of Mark Twain’s “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” Everett, however, shifts the novel’s narrative perspective from Huck to Jim. “Huck Finn is a masterpiece. This retelling just might be, too,” wrote The New York Times.

The reading and talk will take place at 7 p.m. Sept. 20 in Asbury Hall, 341 Delaware Ave., Buffalo.

Given Twain’s significant stint as a newsman in Buffalo early in his career — and the Buffalo Public Library’s ownership of an original Huck Finn manuscript, on display in their Mark Twain Room — the Buffalo Humanities Festival will continue at the Central Library Branch, 1 Lafayette Square in downtown Buffalo at 9:30 a.m. Sept. 21.

Everett’s presentation and all Saturday festival events are free and open to the public, but registration is required. Organizers are expecting a full house for Everett’s talk; guests are encouraged to reserve seats early. The event schedule and registration links are available online at the festival’s website. 

Now in its 11th year, the Buffalo Humanities Festival, organized by the UB’s Humanities Institute (HI), represents an ongoing partnership with SUNY Buffalo State University, Canisius University, Humanities New York and Niagara University. Round trip shuttle service leaving from the Center for the Arts on the North Campus to Asbury Hall on Friday and to the Buffalo & Erie County Central Library on Saturday will be provided.

“Percival Everett is one of the finest contemporary American stylists writing today,” says Christina Milletti, associate professor in the Department of English who serves as HI’s executive director. “His fiction provides a unique look at American culture and embedded racism from perspectives that historically have been marginalized in literature.”

And those perspectives lean right into the festival’s theme of “Hauntings,” a term the festival is using to illuminate historical material that is repressed, unresolved or simply unknown or forgotten.

“History, literature and art are full of figures and stories that, for a variety of reasons, have not made it into mainstream conversations,” says Libby Otto, HI’s director and a professor of modern art and art history, College of Arts and Sciences. “This year, the Buffalo Humanities Festival is asking what happens when we make the margins the center and open the door to new stories and histories.”

Saturday’s festival, which includes free snacks and a light lunch, launches these questions with an opening reading by Eric Gansworth, Canisius University professor of English and enrolled Onondaga, born and raised at the Tuscarora Nation, reading from and discussing his young adult novel, “Apple: Skin to the Core,” winner of the American Indian Youth Literature Award, Printz Honor Willer, and longlisted for a National Book Award.

Tom Reigstad, professor emeritus of English at SUNY Buffalo State, a Twain scholar and author of the recently published “The Illustrated Mark Twain and the Buffalo Express: 10 Stories and Over a Century of Sketches,” will present the talk, “Mark Twain’s Haunts Around Western New York.”

Other day-two presenters include:

• Meredith Conti, associate professor of theatre and dance, who will talk about guns in American theater.
• Miriam Thaggert, professor of English, who will discuss the overlooked history of African American women and their role in the railroad industry.
• Yan Liu, associate professor of history, will speak about “Haunting Smells: Aromatics and the Olfactory Culture of Medieval China.”
• Laura Kremmel, assistant professor in the English Department at Niagara University, who will speak on depictions of dementia in gothic literature and film.
• Ana Grujic and Adrienne Hill, co-founders of the Buffalo-Niagara LGBTQ History Project, who will talk about recovering the erased history of LGBTQ gathering places.

For questions about accessibility or to request accommodations, contact festival organizers by phone at 716-645-2591 or by email at huminst@buffalo.edu. Two weeks advance notice will allow organizers to provide seamless access.