Save the Date: March 26, 2026!

CAALS 2026 welcomes Marlon James, recipient of the 2015 Man Booker Prize.

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The Marygrove Conservancy will welcome award-winning

novelist Marlon James as the 37th guest author in the

Contemporary American Authors Lecture Series. He will

deliver the Bauder Lecture at 7 p.m. on March 26, 2026 in the

Marygrove Conservancy Theatre, 8425 West McNichols in Detroit. Professor James, who was born in Jamaica in 1970, is the author of five novels: John Crow’s Devil (2005), The Book of Night Women (2009), A Brief History of Seven Killings (2014), which received the 2015 Man Booker Prize, Black Leopard, Red Wolf (2019), and Moon Witch, Spider King (2022). He is the second Man Booker Prize winner to appear as part of CAALS. (The amazing Paul Beatty, who visited us in 2012, won the award in 2016.) James is the fourth Caribbean-born writer to take part in CAALS. The others were Jamaica Kincaid (Antigua-1995), Merle Collins (Grenada -1999), and Edwidge Danticat (Haiti-2002). With his Riverhead editor Jake Morrissey, he hosted a podcast, Marlon and Jake Read Dead People, an informal, critical discussion of dead writers that ran from 2020 to 2023. In 2024, he wrote a critically acclaimed television series, Get Millie Black, broadcast on HBO and Britain’s Channel 4. James is emeritus professor of English at Macalester College in St. Paul, MN.

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About A Brief History of Seven Killings (2014):

“It’s epic in every sense of that word: sweeping, mythic, over-the-top, colossal and dizzyingly complex. It’s also raw, dense, violent, scalding, darkly comic, exhilarating and exhausting—a testament to Mr. James’s vaulting ambition and prodigious talent.”
—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

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“Exploding with violence and seething with arousal, the third novel by Marlon James cuts a swath across recent Jamaican history…This compelling, not-so-brief history brings off a social portrait worthy of Diego Rivera, antic and engagé, a fascinating tangle of the naked and the dead.”
—The Washington Post

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About Moon Witch, Spider King (2022):

“Moon Witch, Spider King is a breathtaking book, one that functions as well as a standalone as it does a sequel. . . .Make no mistake, this series is absolutely a must-read.” —NPR

  

 

The Contemporary American Authors Lecture Series (CAALS)

Established in 1989, CAALS is an annual event bringing a nationally known African American author to our campus for a public lecture and class session or conversation. Through the generous support of corporate donors, foundations, advertisers, friends, Marygrove College alumni and Board of Trustees members, 

and the Lillian and Donald Bauder Endowment, the series has remained free and accessible to the metropolitan Detroit community. To date, over 11,000 

people have attended the Friday night public readings to hear outstanding writers share their work, and thousands of Detroit area high school and college students 

as well as others in the Detroit community have studied these works and attended class sessions with guest authors in the series. Since 2020, thousands of others 

have viewed the livestreamed event via Detroit Public Television and PBS Books. 

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The Contemporary American Authors Lecture Series and Defining Detroit, a program 

of the Institute for Detroit Studies which began at Marygrove in 2000, have brought to Detroit audiences the recipients of eleven MacArthur “Genius” Grants, ten National Book Awards, nine Pulitzer Prizes, eight Guggenheim Fellowships, five Pushcart Prizes, three Emmy Awards, and one Man Booker Prize. In addition, the two series have welcomed five U.S. Poets Laureate and one Presidential Inaugural Poet.