Sep 6, 2025, 4 PM – 6 PM

Reading and Book Signing: Baldwin: A Love Story by Nicholas Boggs, with Terrance Hayes

Please join us for a special reception, on the occasion of our current exhibition In the Medium of Life: The Drawings of Beauford Delaney, to celebrate the launch of Baldwin: A Love Story, by Nicholas Boggs published by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Boggs will be available to sign copies and will read excerpts from this major new biography which illuminates the most sustaining intimate and artistic relationships that shaped Baldwin’s life and work, including painter Beauford Delaney, his mentor. He will be joined by Terrance Hayes, acclaimed poet, writer, and visual artist whose work has long been influenced by both Baldwin and Delaney. Hayes will read selections from Baldwin’s writing, as well as his own.

BALDWIN: A LOVE STORY, the first major biography of James Baldwin in three decades, reveals how profoundly the writer’s personal relationships shaped his life and work. Drawing on newly uncovered archival material and original research and interviews, this spellbinding book tells the overlapping stories of Baldwin’s most sustaining intimate and artistic relationships: with his mentor, the Black American painter Beauford Delaney; with his lover and muse, the Swiss painter Lucien Happersberger; and with his collaborators, the famed Turkish actor Engin Cezzar and the iconoclastic French artist Yoran Cazac, whose long-overlooked significance as Baldwin’s last great love is explored in these pages for the first time.

Nicholas Boggs shows how Baldwin drew on all the complex forces within these relationships—geographical, cultural, political, artistic, and erotic—and alchemized them into novels, essays, and plays that speak truth to power and had an indelible impact on the civil rights movement and on Black and queer literary history. Richly immersive, Baldwin: A Love Story follows the writer’s creative journey between Harlem, Paris, Switzerland, the southern United States, Istanbul, Africa, the South of France, and beyond. In so doing, it magnifies our understanding of the public and private lives of one of the major literary figures of the twentieth century, whose contributions only continue to grow in influence.

Nicholas Boggs

Nicholas Boggs is the author of the biography Baldwin: A Love Story, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Zadie Smith calls it “compulsively interesting and beautifully written [with] something to treasure on every page.” He is also the co-editor of Baldwin’s collaboration with French artist Yoran Cazac, Little Man, Little Man: A Story of Childhood, which Baldwin dedicated to Beauford Delaney. The recipient of a 2023 Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant as well as fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Scholars-in-Residence Program at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and the Leon Levy Center for Biography, as well as residencies at Yaddo and MacDowell, he lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Beauford Delaney

Beauford Delaney holds a place in the history of American art of the postwar period that is challenging to define. Born in 1901 in Knoxville, Tennessee, he grew up in the segregated South and studied fine art at the Massachusetts Normal School in Boston in the late 1920s. By 1929, he had moved to New York, where he continued his artistic practice at the height of the Harlem Renaissance, producing realistic portraits and cubist-inflected street scenes of the Greenwich Village neighborhood where he lived. In 1953, at the urging of his friend, James Baldwin, Delaney moved to Paris, the city where he would spend the rest of his life. In Paris, Delaney drew and painted portraits, while at the same time, he developed an all-over calligraphic abstract painting style. For two decades, he painted abstract and figurative works simultaneously, sometimes combining both languages by inserting barely visible figures into abstract compositions, or by working up backgrounds full of abstract incidence that often competed with the fully realized portraits embedded within them. Delaney produced drawings from the beginning of his career in the early 1920s in Knoxville, until his mental illness prevented him from continuing in the early 1970s. Although he rarely drew preparatory sketches, his works on paper closely followed techniques and motifs he used in his paintings.
Terrance Hayes

Terrance Hayes is the author of seven poetry collections: So to Speak; American Sonnets for My Past And Future Assassin, a finalist for the National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, and TS Eliot Prize; How to Be Drawn; Lighthead, winner of the 2010 National Book Award for poetry; Muscular Music, recipient of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award; Hip Logic, winner of the 2001 National Poetry Series, and Wind in a Box. His prose collection, To Float In The Space Between: Drawings and Essays in Conversation with Etheridge Knight, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and winner of the Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism. His most recent book, Watch Your Language, is a fascinating collection of graphic reviews, illustrated prose, and visualized poetics addressing the last century of American poetry. Hayes has received fellowships from the MacArthur Foundation, Guggenheim Foundation, and Whiting Foundation, and is a professor of English at New York University.

In the Medium of Life: The Drawings of Beauford Delaney is made possible by Lonti Ebers, Agnes Gund, Marie-Josée and Henry R. Kravis, Alice and Tom Tisch, and Isabel Stainow Wilcox.

Special thanks to Michael Rosenfeld Gallery for their support and the Estate of Beauford Delaney for their cooperation in the organization of the exhibition.