Celebrating the exhibition Bloodlines, authors Roxane Gay and Jeff Chang will read recent essays and discuss ideas of race, gender and social histories that influenced the work of Firelei Báez. Both Gay and Chang have written extensively on American culture, politics and the arts. The conversation will be followed by a book signing.

Roxane Gay is the author of the books Ayiti (2011), An Untamed State (2014), Bad Feminist (2014), and Hunger, forthcoming from Harper in 2016. Her writings have been published in McSweeney’s, Oxford American, American Short Fiction, The New York Times, The Nation, Salon, and many others. Gay contributed a fictional story to the catalogue created for Firelei Báez: Bloodlines.

Jeff Chang has been a USA Ford Fellow in Literature and a winner of the North Star News Prize. He has authored two books: Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop (2005) and Who We Be (2014). He currently serves as the Executive Director of the Institute for Diversity in the Arts at Stanford University.