In Conversation with Michael W. Twitty

Join Duke Professor Mark Anthony Neal for a discussion with culinary historian Michael W. Twitty for Durham’s final day of Library Fest 2022.

Durham County Library and Durham Library Foundation are hosting the Second Annual Library Fest (April 18 – 23, 2022), a celebration of public libraries with virtual and in-person programs for all ages. This year’s theme is all about food. The lineup includes cooking classes for kids, dual language programs, a digital history exhibit, STEAM programs, coffee meetups, business programs and more.

Michael W. Twitty is a culinary historian and food writer from the Washington D.C. area. He blogs at Afroculinaria.com. He’s appeared on Bizarre Foods America with Andrew Zimmern, Many Rivers to Cross with Henry Louis Gates and most recently Taste the Nation with Top Chef‘s Padma Lakshmi. HarperCollins released Twitty’s The Cooking Gene in 2017, tracing his ancestry through food from Africa to America and from slavery to freedom. It was a finalist for The Kirkus Prize and The Art of Eating Prize and a 3rd place winner of Barnes & Noble’s Discover New Writer’s Awards in Nonfiction.

Mark Anthony Neal is the James B. Duke Distinguished Professor of African & African American Studies and Chair of the Department of African & African American Studies at Duke University, where he offers courses on Black Masculinity, Popular Culture and Digital Humanities, including signature courses on Michael Jackson & the Black Performance Tradition and The History of Hip-Hop, which he co-teaches with Grammy Award-winning producer 9th Wonder (Patrick Douthit).

Neal is the author of several books including What the Music Said: Black Popular Music and Black Public Culture (1999), Soul Babies: Black Popular Culture and the Post-Soul Aesthetic (2002) and Looking for Leroy: Illegible Black Masculinities (2013).  The 10th Anniversary edition of Neal’s New Black Man was published in February of 2015 by Routledge. Neal is co-editor of That’s the Joint: The Hip-Hop Studies Reader (Routledge), now in its second edition. He is host of the video webcast Left of Black, which is produced in collaboration with the Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke.