On the heels of her recently released debut memoir, The Black Period: On Personhood, Race and Origin, celebrated author and poet Hafizah Augustus Geter joins the Friends of African American Art & Culture (FAAAC) for a reception, book-signing, and moderated talk. The author is joined by her father, world-class artist, painter, sculptor, illustrator, and educator Tyrone Geter, who provided the inspiring artwork featured on the book jacket and throughout the pages of The Black Period.

Dr. Nancy Tolson, FAAAC board member, CMA commissioner, and assistant director of African American Studies at the University of South Carolina, guides the discussion. Q&A to follow. Books will be available for purchase. This program has been made possible, in part, through a grant from the Love, Tito’s foundation. Free with membership or admission.

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Hafizah Augustus Geter is a Nigerian American writer, poet, and literary agent born in Zaria, Nigeria, and raised in Akron, Ohio, and Columbia, South Carolina. Her debut memoir, The Black Period: On Personhood, Race & Origin, (Random House, 2022) is a New Yorker magazine Best Book of 2022, a Good Morning America Anticipated Book, and an Amazon’s Best of the Month Editor’s Pick. She is the author of the poetry collection Un-American (Wesleyan University Press, 2020), an NAACP Image Award and PEN Open Book Award finalist. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Bomb Magazine, Boston Review, The Believer, and The Paris Review, among many others. The poetry committee co-chair of the Brooklyn Literary Council, she is a Bread Loaf Katharine Bakeless nonfiction fellow, a Cave Canem poetry fellow, and a 92Y WomeninPower Fellow and holds an MFA in nonfiction from New York University, where she was an Axinn Fellow. Geter lives in Brooklyn, New York.

In a career that spans two continents, Tyrone Geter has built an international reputation as a world-class artist, painter, sculptor, illustrator, and teacher. Recently retired from his position as an associate professor of art at Benedict College in Columbia, Geter grew up in Anniston, Alabama, during a time defined by strict segregation laws and social injustice. Anniston was a site of numerous acts of racial violence during the Civil Rights Era. The immediacy of these events and an inherited legacy of spiritual strength and fortitude against all the odds inform and shape his work.