Farah Jasmine Griffin (Ph.D. Yale), is the William B. Ransford Professor of English and Comparative Literature and African American Studies at Columbia University. She is the author of Who Set You Flowin’?: The African American Migration Narrative; If You Can’t Be Free, Be a Mystery: In Search of Billie Holiday; Harlem Nocturne: Women Artists and Progressive Politics During World War II; and Read Until You Understand: New and Selected Essays, among other works.
Scholarship and memoir meld in a stimulating collection.-- Kirkus Reviews Powerful...Griffin is consistently incisive and her arguments deeply nuanced. This serves as a testament to the lucidity of Griffin's stimulating oeuvre.-- Publishers Weekly Farah Jasmine Griffin's gorgeous essays reveal the genius, resistance, and freedom dreams of Black artists. Her insights give us hope; her words are endless beauty.--Salamishah Tillet, activist, scholar, and winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Criticism Writer, teacher, activist, visionary, Farah Jasmine Griffin, our greatest Black feminist listener, weaves together a symphony of trenchant and pathbreaking meditations on the exquisite and transformative power of Black music, literature, visual art, film, politics and cultural theory in this singular collection of essays. In Search of a Beautiful Freedom is stirring and lyrical pedagogy in motion. Griffin's art of the essay is both a combination of dazzling prose and galvanizing, ethical wisdom. Rapturous, formidable, an instant classic.--Daphne Brooks, author of Liner Notes for the Revolution