Princeton Professor Imani Perry, whose book Breathe: A Letter to My Sons is the subject of the All School Read this semester, will give a book talk at YDS on Monday, March 2. The event will take place at 5:30 p.m. in the Old Refectory with a reception to follow.
Imani Perry is the Hughes-Rogers Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University, where she also teaches in the Law and Public Affairs program and in Gender and Sexuality Studies. She is a native of Birmingham, Alabama, and spent much of her youth in Cambridge, Mass., and Chicago.
Described as “raw and unflinching,” Breathe explores Perry’s fear and frustration for her African American sons in a society that seems, at times, to be irredeemably racist. Yet at the same time the book offers love, beauty, and possibility in her exhortations to her sons and their peers to find courage and inspiration in Black tradition.
The book is a 2020 NAACP Image Award nominee and was selected for the Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Books of 2019 list.