What In Me is Dark – A Book Launch, Reading, and Celebration with Orlando Reade

What links Thomas Jefferson, Frederick Douglass, Malcolm X, and poetry students at a New Jersey prison? According to BISR faculty Orlando Reade, it’s a shared sense of the emancipatory potential and insurgent political power of John Milton’s Paradise Lost. Reade’s debut book, What In Me is Dark (Astra House), an adept hybrid of literary criticism and political history, traces the “revolutionary afterlives” of Milton’s epic poem through twelve of its most prominent interlocutors. 

Join us Friday, December 13th, at BISR Central as we celebrate What In Me is Dark. Following a short reading, Reade will sit down with BISR faculty Rebecca Ariel Porte, currently at work on a book about paradise and the Golden Age; literary scholar Katie Kadue, writer of a celebrated 2021 n+1 essay about Twitter as Miltonic hellscape; and author Anna Della Subin, whose book, Accidental Gods, explores how the pursuit of paradise gave shape to European colonization of the Americas. Taking What In Me is Dark as a starting point, we will ask: how, across centuries and geographies, do old myths get redeployed to describe new and emerging political realities? And when, and in what context, does the promise of paradise foster revolutionary thought?

Held in partnership with Astra Publishing House and Taylor & Co. Books, the event is free to attend with a suggested $10 donation. Copies of What In Me Is Dark will be available to purchase courtesy of Taylor & Co. 

The event is free to attend, with a suggested $10 donation. Beer, wine, seltzer, and snacks will be served. Doors open at 7:00pm; the reading will begin at 7:30. Please RSVP below.

Event Schedule

Friday, 7:30pm ET
December 13, 2024

$0.00

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