Please join us for an evening of readings and performances curated by Hemley Boum on the night of the 21st at 6:30pm

Hemley will read excerpts of her novel and workshop participants will showcase writings on the themes of migration.

Hemley Boum first noticed the silence around colonialism in her home country of Cameroon through her childhood reading: at school she exclusively read European authors, except for a fewlike Chinua Achebe or Aimé Césaire, who represented the years of struggle in African literature. This unconscious rejection of the colonial period has shaped much of her work, in conjunction with her experiences living between Cameroon and France, where she lives today. 
Boum’s writing centers on the way exile deconstructs the passing on of ideas and examines the ways communication and heritage must be reinvented when we leave the place where our connections and memory are established, and inhabit several geographies both physically and internally. Her novels offer a lens to examine the complexities at the intersection of Cameroon’s contemporary history and the human experience,through stories of intergenerational women, systemic violence, the struggle for independence, and decolonization.
Boum's novels have won several awards, including the Prix Ahmadou-Kourouma in 2020 for her novel “Les Jours viennet et passent”, the Grand Prize for Black African Literature and CENE Littéraire Engaged Book Prize in 2016 for “Les Maquisards”, and the Ivorian Prize for Francophone Literature in 2013 for “Si d’aimer.”
Now, she joins us at the Villa Albertine as a resident, where she’s leading creative writing workshops in Oakland, Berkeley, and San Francisco, to gain a deeper understanding of the bay area’s Francophone heritage and further explore what it means today to be someone from elsewhere.