Up-and-coming short-story author Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah will be featured at this year’s Tucson Festival of Books for his debut book “Friday Black” — a collection of dystopian short stories that reveal the painful injustices of life and the grim realities of being young and black in America.

In “Friday Black,” short stories like “The Finkelstein Five”, “Zimmerland” and “How to Sell a Jacket as Told by Ice King” explore racism and cultural unrest in society but also demonstrate how humanity lives on, despite the darkness.

Adjei-Brenyah graduated with an M.F.A. from Syracuse University and was 2016-2017 Olive B. O’Connor fellow in fiction at Colgate University. He was selected by ZZ Packer as the winner of the second Annual Breakwater Review Fiction Contest in 2017.

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Adjei-Brenyah will appear in three panels at this year’s Tucson Festival of Books.

The first panel will tackle short-story writing with several other authors in the “Razor Sharp Short Stories” panel in the Student Union Memorial Center Kachina Room at 11:30 a.m. Saturday, March 2. 

In his second event of the weekend, “New American Imaginations”, Adjei-Brenyah will share the artistic motivation behind his writing and discuss the importance of writing honestly with authors Nishta Mehra and Nafissa Thompson-Spires in the Integrated Learning Center Room 141, at 10 a.m. on Sunday.

Lastly, he will appear in the “Catastrophic Moments” panel with authors Alice Hatcher and Karen Walker, where they will discuss how characters overcome trauma. This panel will take place in Room 350 of the Modern Languages Building at 1 p.m. on Sunday. Book signings will follow on the UA Mall. 

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