Department of English

• Monday, March 16, 2026 - 6:00pm to 8:00pm

The Kelly Writers House

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 this biography for the first time. Baldwin: A Love Story has already garnered rave reviews and high critical praise. It was named a New York Times notable book of 2025 and a top 10 Book of 2025 by Time and The Atlantic.

Nicholas Boggs is the bestselling author of Baldwin: A Love Story (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), which is currently a finalist for the NBCC's John Leonard Prize and for the PEN/Jacqueline Bogard Weld Award for Biography. It was recently awarded the 2026 Stonewall Israel Fishman Non-Fiction Book Award from the American Library Association. He is also the co-editor of Baldwin’s collaboration with French artist Yoran Cazac, Little Man, Little Man: A Story of Childhood. 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, and the Leon Levy Center for Biography, he lives in Brooklyn, New York.

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