Award-winning Jamaican-American writer and academic Thomas Glave comes to Birmingham Literature Festival to discuss his new collection of essays, En Pointe, Off Kilter.
Across 23 newly collected essays, Glave considers some of the defining events and questions shaping Black history and contemporary life, ranging from British colonialism and the transatlantic slave trade to Black Lives Matter and the Covid-19 pandemic.
The collection also explores race and racism, Jamaica, Jamaican queer identity and the literature of the African diaspora, bringing personal reflection into conversation with wider histories of power, migration and resistance.
Glave is an acclaimed essayist, fiction writer and academic whose writing has long explored questions of identity, sexuality, history and the experiences of Black people across the Caribbean and its diaspora.
His previous work has received both an O. Henry Award and a Lambda Literary Award, establishing him as an important voice in contemporary Black and queer literature.
In En Pointe, Off Kilter, he returns to many of the questions that have shaped his writing while reflecting on the dramatic social and political changes of recent decades.
The essays move between intimate personal experience and global history, examining how colonialism and racial injustice continue to influence the present while also considering literature’s ability to challenge the way those histories are remembered.
For Black History Month audiences, the event provides an opportunity to hear a major Caribbean and diaspora writer examine the connections between historical injustice and contemporary Black experience.
Glave will be in conversation with Shantel Edwards, Director of Birmingham Literature Festival, discussing the new collection, his wider body of work and the role of the essay in documenting race, memory and identity.
En Pointe, Off Kilter with Thomas Glave takes place at the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire on Sunday 11th October 2026 from 4:00pm to 5:00pm.
Tickets are £8, with concessions available.
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