Lit Fridays

Lit Friday is a virtual program offered by the August Wilson African American Cultural Center, hosted and produced by the Literary Curator, poet, and art writer Jessica Lanay. For 2025 on final Fridays from February to October at 6pm EST, LIT Friday will reshare previous episodes from the archive as a part of our REPLAY programming and feature new conversations with high impact guests. Lit Friday hosts writers, artists, and thinkers of the African Diaspora for conversations on their latest works and how they intersect with contemporary cultural and political happenings. Former Lit Friday guests include prominent writers and artists such as culture journalists Nelson George and Danyel Smith, Man Booker Prize winner and fiction writer Bernardine Evaristo, memoirist Ashley Ford, photographers such as Ming Smith and Nona Faustine, and acclaimed artists including Dr. Fahamu Pecou and Mikael Owunna. LIT Friday has featured multi-awarded prose and poetry writers such as Airea D. Matthews, Mahogany Browne, Nana Adjei-Brenyah, Roger Reeves, Phillip B. Williams, and many others.

Lit Friday also participates in cross-programming with other major media and educational institutions such as Netflix, the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, the Andy Warhol Museum, and others. Previous guests that Lit Friday has welcomed as the result of community partnering are actor, producer, and director Blair Underwood, documentarian and director Melissa Haizlip, Tony Award winning playwright and director George C. Wolfe, and Tony Award winning actor Ruben Santiago-Hudson.

You can also find Jessica Lanay occasionally conducting interviews for AWAACC’s Truthsayers Speaker Series where she has previously interviewed Son of Baldwin and Nikki Giovanni. You can follow her on Instagram at @hanginthere_kitty.

Please visit the Events page for upcoming Lit Friday conversations.