03.12.2024

LECTURE TITLE: "The Black Religious Experience"
Ayana Mathis will discuss iterations of Black religious experience as represented in her novel, The Unsettled.  Using the novel as a springboard, the talk will expand to include the intersections of Black religious and political life in the U.S., touching on thinkers and writers like James Baldwin, among others. Mathis will also spend some time discussing aspects of religion in the 1980s - the setting of Mathis’s novel - and the rise of the conservative Christian Right. The talk will draw on  aspects of the novel, anecdotes, and Mathis’s own research.  

Ayana Mathis is the author of The Twelve Tribes of Hattie (Knopf, 2012).  Most recently, she published The Unsettled (Knopf, 2023) which was named a New York Times and Washington Post Notable Book of 2023, a best of 2023 by The New Yorker, Publisher’s Weekly, an Oprah Daily Best Novels of 2023, and a Kirkus Reviews Best Books of 2023.  The novel was a finalist for the 2024 Hurston-Wright Legacy Award.  The New York Times calls it, “Poignant, heartbreaking."

Her first novel, THE TWELVE TRIBES OF HATTIE, was a New York Times Bestseller, the second selection for Oprah’s Book Club 2.0, a 2013 New York Times Notable Book, NPR Best Book of 2013, and was long listed for the Dublin Literary Award and a finalist for Hurston-Wright Foundation's Legacy Award. Mathis’s essays and criticism have been published in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, T Magazine,The Financial Times, Rolling Stone, Guernica and Glamour. Currently pursuing her Masters of Divinity at Union Theological Seminary, Mathis’s most recent nonfiction explores the intertwining of faith and American literature in her five- part New York Times essay series “Imprinted By Belief”.

Her work has been supported by the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, and the Bogliasco Foundation. She was a 2020-2021 American Academy in Berlin Prize Fellow. Mathis received her MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and went on to become the first African-American woman to serve as an Assistant Professor in that program. She currently teaches at Hunter College in the MFA Program.