Wednesday, February 16, 2011

#blacklitchat transcript: Aminatta Forna

I'm pretty late in posting our transcript from the Feb. 6 #blacklitchat with Aminatta Forna, author of The Memory of Love. (She is @AminattaForna on Twitter.) Here is the transcript of our conversation with her, which she made time for during her U.S. tour (she lives in England and Sierra Leone).

We're doing two #blacklitchat conversations this month, a first for us (me and @deegospel, my co-moderator). We also did the chat with Aminatta Forna at 7 p.m., earlier than usual.

And I realized a couple of weeks after we scheduled it that Feb. 6 was also Super Bowl Sunday. So many of our readers were focused on football. Some folks were able to join and we gave away a book during the chat - another first for #blacklitchat.

Reading The Memory of Love was wonderful. It's a beautiful novel and transports the reader to Sierra Leone in the years after the civil war there. My reading has been very U.S.-focused in the past few years; The Memory of Love makes me want to do more international, specifically African reading.

If you missed our chat, you can learn more about Aminatta Forna and her work via one of the links below:
Interview on BookPage
On the Diane Rehm Show
Review in NYTimes

And here are her upcoming tour dates.

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