The award-winning author Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah gave an online reading of his work as part of the Mark Twain Distinguished Writer-in-Residence Program on Thursday, Oct. 23.
Adjei-Brenyah was the fourth author chosen for the Mark Twain Distinguished Writer-in-Residence Program. The program is sponsored by the University of Connecticut’s Creative Writing Program and the Bloom Endowment Fund. Every two years, the program invites an author to UConn in October to give a public reading and work directly with selected students on their own writing.
The webinar began at 6:00 p.m. Sean Forbes, an English professor and the director of UConn’s Creative Writing Program, kicked things off by introducing Adjei-Brenyah and his many accomplishments. In 2018, Adjei-Brenyah published a New York Times bestselling short story collection, titled “Friday Black.” In 2023, he released “Chain-Gang All-Stars,” which was a finalist for the 2023 National Book Award for Fiction and recipient of many other awards.
Before reading, Adjei-Brenyah reflected on the importance of the date, which was the seventh anniversary of “Friday Black” getting published. It reminded him of time passing and how much his career has changed since then.
“People can say I’ve been teaching your book for many, many years, which I’m so grateful for,” Adjei-Brenyah said. “But it’s crazy that I have anything that anyone’s able to do anything with for many, many years.”
He also gave a preface for how he used to view the prison system, telling of an anecdotal experience he had with his father. When he was younger, he used to see those imprisoned as bad people who deserved to be jailed, a view he now dissents from and comments on with “Chain-Gang All-Stars.” He describes the novel as an “imagined future” where imprisoned people can partake in death matches to win themselves freedom.
He began reading from the beginning of “Chain-Gang All-Stars,” where the setting of one of these death matches unfolds. Adjei-Brenyah’s voice was charged with tension, punctuating dramatic moments with emphatic yells. You could feel his energy through the screen, channeling the announcer’s fiery presence and the eager crowd, excited to see the televised killings.
After the opening, Adjei-Brenyah stepped back to provide more information about the prison system and gun violence. He spoke of the systemic issues at play and how it influences crime, with many perpetuators coming from poverty or having mental health issues. Because these issues do not get addressed, they get caught up in the cycle of imprisonment without adequate access to resources to escape.
Adjei-Brenyah then read from a later segment of the book, one that focuses on someone in the fictional prison system who organized a hunger strike. In the novel, she led the protest to try improving prison conditions but also to combat the system as a whole, as she said people were, “being held for no crime at all except trying to live.”
Once he finished reading, Adjei-Brenyah zoomed out again to look at recent actions taken by the U.S. government. He said that authoritarian structures “always create an ‘other’ that must be caged or killed or silenced, that’s what the administration is doing now.” He stressed that if people love each other more than they fear each other, it makes it harder for people in power to control you.
The final piece Adjei-Brenyah read was a creative nonfiction short story from “Friday Black.” He wrote it when a professor asked him to write a story that could change the world. The writing was more contained and less intense than “Chain-Gang All-Stars” and focused on familial moments, different routines and the feeling of hunger prevalent in all these experiences.
Afterwards, Adjei-Brenyah answered questions from Forbes and sent in from the audience. Some questions were more general probes about his writing style, while others more specifically pertained to parts of the readings. When asked about his motivations as an author, especially for “Chain-Gang All-Stars”, Adjei-Brenyah said a lot of it stems from empathy.
“I care about how humans treat each other, I care about compassion, I care about living in a free, democratic nation and the prison gave me the space to think about that a lot,” Adjei-Brenyah said.
When asked about his ideal reform for the current prison system in the U.S., Adjei-Brenyah said there should be more work put in to find out why certain crimes get committed and how to prevent them in the first place. He proposed the need for a “fundamental reimagining of our society that thinks about why people are doing these things.”
The second day of the Mark Twain Distinguished Writer-in-Residence Program, where Adjei-Brenyah worked directly with students on their own writing, occurred the following day on Friday, Oct. 24.