A Book Reading by Emmanuel Iduma

With a mediative foreword by Teju Cole, Emmanuel Iduma’s beguiling writing in A Stranger’s Pose takes the reader on a journey across 23 African cities. It is part memoir, part, travel writing and part meditation. His sensuous storytelling is interspersed with over 40 mesmerising black and white photographs from acclaimed contemporary African photographers, including a description of his encounter with the famed photographer Malick Sidibe. In his talk and reading at Middlebury College, Iduma will discuss notions of form, genre, and the complex dance between photography and text.

Emmanuel Iduma is a writer of fiction and nonfiction. Born and raised in Nigeria, he has contributed essays and stories to journals, magazines, artists’ books, and exhibition catalogues. He is the author of The Sound of Things to Come (first published as Farad in Nigeria), and received a 2017 Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation grant in arts writing, for his blog “A Sum of Encounters.” He is a faculty member at the School of Visual Arts, where he obtained an MFA in Art Criticism and Writing. In 2017, he was associate curator of the Nigerian pavilion at the Venice Biennale. He is the author, most recently, of A Stranger’s Pose.