Namwali Serpell

Namwali Serpell is a Zambian writer and a professor of English at Harvard. She is the author of Seven Modes of Uncertainty, The Old Drift: A Novel, Stranger Faces, and The Furrows: An Elegy.

Critical Navel-Gazing

If criticism is in crisis, it’s not the critic’s problem
Namwali Serpell
June 10, 2024
Installation of found hand mirrors arranged in an oval on a wall.

Race Off

The fantasy of race transformation
Namwali Serpell
September 27, 2021
The activist Gloria Richardson walking past National Guardsmen during a civil rights march in Cambridge

Unbothered

The grace of black nonchalance
Namwali Serpell
December 1, 2020
Photo of Namwali Serpell on left; photo of Maria Tumarkin on right
Conversations

The Limits of Empathy

Two writers on the ethics of pen and paper
Namwali Serpell
and
Maria Tumarkin
December 1, 2020