Interest in Black authors is surging

The South Florida Book Festival, presented by the African American Research Library and Cultural Center, will be virtual this year Friday and Saturday. Though the event is live streamed, the festival will still feature some of its most well-known events, ranging from book discussions to cocktail-making tutorials.

The festival will be held on soflobookfest.com.

The Eat, Drink, Read event is usually ticketed, but this year it’s free. It will be live streamed on Friday at 7 p.m. and will feature Sarah Tiong’s new book, “Sweet, Savory, Spicy.” Chef Alex Kuk of local Temple Street Eatery will be doing a live cooking demonstration.

The Flip & Slip virtual lounge will feature a signature cocktail for the event that attendees can make at home.

Because of the Black Lives Matter movement, there is a surge in interest in Black and African American literature, said Makiba Foster, the AfricanAmerican Research Library & Cultural Center regional manager. Social justice themes are present in many of the conversations.

“All these books speak to the current moment,” Foster said. “It speaks to joy and pain, it speaks to finding solutions to some of these questions. It speaks to littlest of us all. Our youngest author wrote a children’s book about the mermaid.”

Featured writers

■ Eddie S. Glaude Jr. is the chair of Department of African American Studies at Princeton and is the author of “Begin Again,” which looks at James Baldwin.

■ Audrey Wright-Peterman has written about the impact of the environment on South Florida’s future. She is the author of “From my Jamaican Gully to the World,” which goes back to her roots in the Jamaican countryside.

■ Will Loiseau lives in South Florida and also as a holistic nutritional consultant. His book “Quake” is about his experience being in the epicenter of the earthquake in Haiti.

■ Calvin Alexander Ramsey is a playwright and author. His play “The Green Book” is about the struggles of African Americans travelling during Jim Crow, and he also wrote a children’s book, “Ruth and the Green Book.”

■ Bianca Ukah is a young writer based in Coconut Creek. At 4, she published a book about one of her favorite hobbies, swimming, called “Binky the Mermaid: The Fin-tastic Race”

■ Alice Randall wrote “The Wind Done Gone,” “Pushkin and the Queen of Spades,” “Rebel Yell,” and “Ada’s Rules.” She is also a songwriter and was the

first Black woman to write a No. 1 country song, “XXX’s and OOO’s.”

■ Darryl Littleton is an Emmy-nominated comedy sketch writer who recently released “This Day in Comedy: The Ethnic Encyclopedia of Laughter.” He also hosts a podcast and spent years as a stand-up comedian entertaining U.S. troops.

■ M.J. Fievre was born in Haiti and writes from Miami. Most recently, she has published “Badass Black Girl: Questions, Quotes, and Affirmations for Teens.”

■ Kyandreia Jones hails from South Florida, and her work has been published in numerous college literary publications and magazines. In 2019, she published “Choose Your Own Adventure SPIES: James Armistead Lafayette,” her first book.

■ Aneeka A. Henderson is an assistant professor at Amherst College, researching African American literature and cultural production. She wrote “Veil & Vow: Marriage Matters in Contemporary African American Culture.”

■ Alix Pierre has taught in three regions: France, the Caribbean and the U.S. He wrote “The Image of the Resistant Woman in Four Black Novelists: Diasporic Vision of the Woman in Resistance in Maryse Condé, Simone Schwarz-Bart, Toni Morrison and Alice Walker”