Join Buxton Books, in collaboration with the International African American Museum (IAAM), for an engaging conversation with National Book Award-winning author Imani Perry about her latest work, Black In Blues, releasing on January 28, 2025. For tickets and more information, please click here.
Named by TIME Magazine as ‘one of the most anticipated books of 2025‘, Black In Blues delves into the profound connection between Blackness and the color blue, tracing its roots from the indigo cloths of West Africa to the creation of blues music. Through art, history, and personal narrative, she examines how blue evokes both hope and melancholy, illuminating its significance in Black culture and identity.
Don’t miss this thought-provoking discussion about Perry’s creative process and how Black in Blues redefines the intersections of race, memory, and resilience.
Ticket purchases include a signed copy of Black in Blues. To purchase tickets, please click here.
*IAAM Members receive $5 off the purchase of their tickets. Upon signing into your account, the discount will be applied automatically. To learn more about becoming a member, please click here.
About Black in Blues:
A surprising, beautiful meditation on the color blue—and its fascinating role in Black history and culture—from National Book Award winner Imani Perry
Throughout history, Black life has been remarkably intertwined with another color: blue. In daily life, it is evoked in countless ways, from the hopefulness of a blue sky to the deep melancholy of Louis Armstrong’s question, “What did I do to be so Black and blue?” In this book, celebrated author Imani Perry uses the world’s favorite color as a springboard for a riveting emotional, cultural, and spiritual journey—an examination of race and Blackness that transcends politics or ideology.
Perry traces both blue and Blackness from their earliest roots to their many embodiments of contemporary culture, drawing deeply from her own life as well as from art and history: the dyed indigo cloths of West Africa that were traded for human life in the sixteenth century; the fundamentally American art form of blues music, sitting at the crossroads of pain and pleasure; the blue flowers Perry plants to honor a loved one, gone too soon.
Poignant, spellbinding, and utterly original, Black in Blues is a brilliant work that could only have come from the mind of one of our greatest writers.
About Imani Perry:
Imani Perry is the National Book Award-winning author of South to America, as well as eight other books of nonfiction. She is the Henry A. Morss Jr. and Elisabeth W. Morss Professor of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University, and is a 2023 MacArthur Fellow. Perry lives between Philadelphia and Cambridge with her two sons.
About International African American Museum (IAAM):
For more information about the mission and history of IAAM, please click here.