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Baldwin: A Love Story

An evening with Nicholas Boggs and George M. Johnson.

To end Pride season, join the Library and Loyalty Bookstores for a special celebration of author James Baldwin and his legacy with Nicholas Boggs, author of Baldwin: A Love Story. In conversation with George M. Johnson, Boggs will discuss this spellbinding new exploration of Baldwin's life and work through his personal relationships. Come learn about one of our most beloved literary treasures with us. 

Copies of the book will be available for sale and signing from Loyalty Bookstores. 

About the book:
Drawing on new archival material, original research, and interviews, this spellbinding book is the first major biography of James Baldwin in three decades, revealing how profoundly his personal relationships shaped his life and work. 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.

About the author and conversation partner:

Nicholas Boggs is the author of the New York Times bestselling biography, BALDWIN: A Love Story (FSG, 2025), winner of the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography, the Stonewall/Israel Fishman Nonfiction Award, and the Randy Shilts Nonfiction Award. It was named a Top Ten Book of 2025 by Time magazine and The Atlantic, and a New York Times Notable Book of the year. In addition, it was recognized with an Audie Award for Best Audiobook in History/Biography. Also the co-editor of Baldwin's collaboration with French artist Yoran Cazac, Little Man, Little Man: A Story of Childhood (2018), Boggs' research and writing have been supported by fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Humanities Center, the Gilder Lehrman Center and Beinecke Library at Yale, the Scholars-in-Residence Program at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and the Leon Levy Center for Biography, as well as a 2023 Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant. He was educated at Yale (BA), American University (MFA), and Columbia (PhD). He lives in New York City. 

George M Johnson is an Award-Winning Black Non-Binary Writer, Author, and Executive Producer. They are the New York Times Bestselling Author of the Young Adult memoir All Boys Aren’t Blue discussing their adolescence growing up as a young Black Queer boy in New Jersey through a series of powerful essays. The book was optioned for Television by Gabrielle Union in 2020, and as of 2024 is the #1 most banned and challenged book in the United States. In 2018, George served as a NY State Spokesperson for the HIV stops with me Campaign. George was listed on The Root 100 Most Influential African Americans in 2020. The Out 100 Most Influential LGBTQ People in 2021. And in 2022 was honored as one of the TIME100 Next Most Influential People in the World for their fight against censorship in the United States. In 2021 they wrote and Executive Produced the Dramatic Reading of All Boys Aren’t Blue starring Jenifer Lewis and Dyllon Burnside which received a 2022 Special Recognition Award from GLAAD, and a 2023 Emmy Nomination for Outstanding Daytime Special. As a former journalist, George has written for over 50 major outlets including Teen Vogue, Entertainment Tonight, NBC, and Buzzfeed and Huffpost. In 2019 George was awarded the Salute to Excellence Award by the National Association of Black Journalists for their article “When Racism Anchors your Health” in Vice Magazine. Their second memoir We Are Not Broken was released in September of 2021. It received the Carter G. Woodson Award which recognizes books that “accurately and sensitively depict the experience of one or more historically marginalized racial/ethnic groups in the United States”. The book also received the Nonfiction Honor Book in the YA category from the International Literacy Association. Their third book Flamboyants the Queer Harlem Renaissance I wish I’d Known was released in September of 2024. Their first fiction book co-written with bestselling author Leah Johnson, THERE’S ALWAYS NEXT YEAR was released December 2025, receiving a Starred Review from Booklist and is a Good Morning America Young Adult Book Club pick. George is also a proud HBCU alum twice over, and a member of Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity Incorporated.

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