Please join us on Wednesday, September 25th at 8pm as we celebrate the release of the new and expanded fifteenth-anniversary edition of Zong! As told to the author by Setaey Adamu Boateng by m. nourbeSe philip, published by Graywolf Press. m. nourbeSe philip will be joined in conversation by Tonya M. Foster. Book sales will be managed by Books Are Magic.

Zong! is a haunting lifeline between archive and memory, law and poetry.

In November 1781, the captain of the slave ship Zong ordered that some 150 Africans be murdered by drowning so that the ship’s owners could collect insurance monies. Relying entirely on the words of the legal decision Gregson v. Gilbert—the only extant public document related to the massacre—Zong! tells the story that cannot be told yet must be told. Equal parts song, moan, shout, oath, ululation, curse, and chant, Zong! excavates the legal text. Memory, history, and law collide and metamorphose into the poetics of the fragment. Through the innovative use of fugal and counterpointed repetition, Zong! becomes an anti-narrative lament that stretches the boundaries of the poetic form, haunting the spaces of forgetting and mourning the forgotten.

This fifteenth-anniversary edition features a new preface by the author and new essays by Saidiya Hartman and Katherine McKittrick. Widely regarded as one of the most influential and revered works of twenty-first-century literature, this new edition of Zong! will ensure this staggering work’s enduring legacy.

This event will also be livestreamed for free on The Poetry Project’s YouTube channel.