Program:

Doors for this event open at 12:00 p.m.  
Program begins promptly at 1:00 p.m. 
Guests are encouraged to arrive early, as late admission cannot be guaranteed. 

More Info:

Featuring Sonia Sanchez & Louis Massiah in conversation.

“We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.” - Toni Morrison

During the week of what would have been Toni Morrison’s 89th birthday, we celebrate the words, and radical life of one of our most beloved authors.

Presented in collaboration with the African American Museum in Philadelphia, Moonstone Arts Center, and Scribe Video Center—we pay tribute to the novelist, educator and icon who touched so many lives through language and narrative. Please join us for a film screening, conversation and poetic remembrance to the late Nobel Prize-winning novelist. 

Beginning with a screening of The Foreigner’s Home, the day’s events will progress with a conversation between writer Sonia Sanchez and filmmaker, Louis Massiah—each offering reflections on Morrison’s legacy and impact. In response to Morrison’s work, the program will conclude with selected readings by local poets and writers from Moonstone Art Center’s newly-published journal, In Remembrance to Toni Morrison. 

Copies of In Remembrance to Toni Morrison will be available for purchase at the museum during this program. 

BUY TICKETS HERE

The Foreigner's Home (USA, 2017, 57 min)
Produced by Rian Brown, Geoff Pingree and Ford Morrison

The Foreigner’s Home explores Toni Morrison’s artistic and intellectual vision through “The Foreigner’s Home,” her 2006 exhibition at the Louvre Museum in Paris. Through exclusive footage we observe Morrison in dialogue with artists, most prominently, writer Edwidge Danticat, as the discussion of “foreignness” extends beyond the urgent questions of migration in the Americas, Europe, and in the Middle East, and explores art’s crucial role in comprehending the human problems that surround such questions. The film features extensive archival still and motion pictures of American and international topics and events basic to Morrison’s vision—from slavery to the blues, from Hurricane Katrina to the current migration crisis in the Middle East and Europe.

More on our speakers: 

Louis Massiah is an independent filmmaker who explores historical and political subjects. His producing and directing credits include Trash (1985), The Bombing of Osage Avenue (1986), Cecil B. Moore (1987), W.E.B. Du Bois: A Biography in Four Voices (1995), and Louise Alone Thompson Patterson: In Her Own Words (2002). He also produced two films for the PBS series, Eyes on the Prize II (1990). In addition to his film work, Massiah founded the Scribe Video Center, a West Philadelphia-based media arts organization that provides training and equipment access to emerging filmmakers and community organizations. Massiah is a graduate of Cornell University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, receiving a degree in documentary filmmaking.

Sonia Sanchez is a poet, activist, scholar; the Laura Carnell Professor of English and Women’s Studies at Temple University; recipient of both the Robert Frost Medal for distinguished lifetime service to American poetry and Langston Hughes Poetry Award; one of the most important writers of the Black Arts Movement; the author of sixteen books including Like the Singing Coming off the Drums, Does Your House Have Lions?, Wounded in the House of a Friend, and Shake Loose My Skin.

Toni Morrison, born in 1931, was one of the most highly celebrated American novelists of the latter 20th century and an icon of Black literature and thought. Morrison wrote 11 novels over the course of her near-50-year career and has received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, Nobel Prize in Literature, PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In addition she authored a wide variety of short fiction, nonfiction, and theatre. Her novel Beloved won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction in 1988.

BUY TICKETS HERE