Zachary Price and Kenneth W. Warren on Leon Forrest’s Divine Days February Evening Program

February Evening Program

You’re invited to an in-person book launch for Divine Days, originally published in 1992 and recently reissued by the Seminary Co-op Offsets imprint of Northwestern University Press. 

A kaleidoscopic whorl of characters, language, music, and Black experience, this saga follows Joubert Jones, an aspiring playwright, for one week in 1966 as he pursues the lore and legends of fictional Forest County, a place resembling Chicago’s South Side.

This edition brings Forrest’s masterpiece back into print, incorporating hundreds of editorial changes that the author had requested from W. W. Norton, but were not made for their editions in 1993 and 1994. Much of the inventory from the original printing of the book by Another Chicago Press in 1992 had been destroyed in a disastrous warehouse fire.

Zachary Price is an assistant professor of performance studies in the Department of Drama and a core faculty member in the Department of African American Studies at the University of California, Irvine. An interdisciplinary theorist and performance practitioner, he is the author of Black Dragon: Afro Asian Performance and the Martial Arts Imagination (The Ohio State University Press, 2022) and numerous scholarly articles and book chapters. His research and pedagogy focus on African American drama and Black cultural expression across an array of performance modalities. Price holds a PhD from UC Santa Barbara, MFA from The New School, and a BA from Northwestern University. He is the grandson of Leon and Marianne Forrest.

Kenneth W. Warren is the University of Chicago Fairfax M. Cone Distinguished Service Professor. He is the author of What Was African American Literature?, So Black and Blue: Ralph Ellison and the Occasion of Criticism, and Black and White Strangers: Race and American Literary Realism. Warren holds a PhD from Stanford University.

Social hour 5:30 PM to 6:30 PM with light hors d’oeuvres. Bar accepts cash or credit cards. Presentation and book signing to follow.

This program is free but you MUST preregister via website by February 13.

Registering for the program will allow you the opportunity to purchase copies of Divine Days for $22.00 for pickup at ULCC on the night of the program or $27.00 if shipped to your address.