46th Annual Langston Hughes Festival
February 13 - 14, 2025
In 1925, a literary, musical, artistic, cultural, and unapologetically Black movement solidified in Harlem, and 100 years later, we will gather to commemorate and celebrate the Harlem Renaissance and one of its greatest and most prolific scholars, Langston Hughes, during the Annual Langston Hughes Festival. In 2025, we will bestow the Festival Medal upon New York Times bestselling author Roxane Gay.
The Langston Hughes Festival commences Thursday, February 13, 2025 with a Student Symposium. The Student Symposium CALL FOR PROPOSALS (CFP) is LIVE NOW for Student Creatives to submit Proposals for Projects that will be featured during the daytime event. Check out the Black Studies Instagram Page for more information. Prizes will be awarded!
The Evening Ceremony, Thursday, February 13, 2025, will include a reading by Gay, and she will be joined in conversation by Edwidge Danticat, the 2011 Langston Hughes Festival Recipient.
To conclude the festivities, we will host the first Langston Hughes Festival Fundraising Breakfast, Friday, February 14, 2025, also known as Valentine’s Day. In 1925, a group of friends held a breakfast party for Langston Hughes; they took a picture at 580 St. Nicholas Avenue, and historic Shepard Hall can be seen in the background of the photo. The new Black Studies Department Office is located in Shepard Hall, and to raise support for Black Studies, we invite you and your beloved — familial love, romantic love, bestie love, sibling love, whatever type of love that may be — to join us in celebrating Langston Hughes who famously wrote, “I was in love with Harlem long before I got there.”
The 2025 Langston Hughes Festival Theme is Black Love, and we will celebrate Black Love in all its iterations! In addition, in honor of both Gay and Danticat, this special two-day Harlem Renaissance Centennial will include a celebration of Haitian music and food.
Roxane Gay’s writing appears in Best American Mystery Stories 2014, Best American Short Stories 2012, Best Sex Writing 2012, A Public Space, McSweeney’s, Tin House, Oxford American, American Short Fiction, Virginia Quarterly Review, and many others. She is a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times. She is the author of the books Ayiti, An Untamed State, the New York Times bestselling Bad Feminist, the nationally bestselling Difficult Women and the New York Times bestselling Hunger. She is also the author of World of Wakanda for Marvel. She has several books forthcoming and is also at work on television and film projects. She also has a newsletter, The Audacity and once had a podcast, The Roxane Gay Agenda.
Edwidge Danticat is the author of several books, including Breath, Eyes, Memory, an Oprah Book Club selection, Krik? Krak!, a National Book Award finalist, The Farming of Bones, an American Book Award winner; the novels-in-stories, The Dew Breaker, Claire of the Sea Light, and The Art of Death, a National Book Critics Circle finalist for Criticism. She has written seven books for children and young adults, a travel narrative, After the Dance, and a collection of essays, Create Dangerously. Her memoir, Brother, I'm Dying, was a 2007 finalist for the National Book Award and a 2008 winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography. Her story collection, Everything Inside, was a 2020 winner of The Story Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Fiction Prize. She is a 2009 MacArthur Fellow, and is currently the Wun Tsun Tam Mellon Professor of the Humanities in the Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies at Columbia University.
Join us February 13-14, 2025 for the 46th Annual Langston Hughes Festival!
— Jervette R. Ward, Director of the Langston Hughes Festival & Chair of the Black Studies Department
Last Updated: 11/12/2024 20:00