Student Event: Sky Full of Elephants Conversation

In partnership with Fisk University the Frist Art Museum, and the Engine for Art, Democracy and Justice (EADJ), join us for a critical conversation featuring author Cebo Campbell and Michael Ewing, associate curator at the Frist Art Museum. This dialogue will examine the cultural narratives presented in Campbell’s literary work , offering insight into contemporary expressions of identity, representation, and the Black experience. Read the book and see the exhibition before the talk for a rich experience!

Cebo Campbell is a bestselling author, screenwriter, and director whose work explores identity, imagination, and the narratives that shape culture. His works have earned both critical acclaim and commercial success, already establishing him as one of the standout American storytellers of his generation. Beyond his literary and cinematic work, Cebo is the founder of UnOthr, a multidisciplinary studio and cultural brand dedicated to creating and adapting stories across books, film, events, and spaces. At its core, UnOthr is an ecosystem for authored worlds, where story becomes the architecture for new ways of seeing ourselves and building culture.

One day, a cataclysmic event occurs: all of the white people in America walk into the nearest body of water. A year later, Charles Brunton is a Black man living in an entirely new world. Having served time in Pr*son for a wrongful conviction, he’s now a professor of electric and solar power systems at Howard University when he receives a call from someone he wasn’t even sure existed: his daughter Sidney, a nineteen-year-old who watched her white mother and step-family drown themselves in the lake behind their house.

Traumatized by the event, and terrified of the outside world, Sidney has spent a year in isolation in Wisconsin. Desperate for help, she turns to the father she never met, a man she has always resented. Sidney and Charlie meet for the first time as they embark on a journey across America headed for Alabama, where Sidney believes she may still have some family left. But neither Sidney or Charlie is prepared for this new world and how they see themselves in it.

When they enter the Kingdom of Alabama, everything Charlie and Sidney thought they knew about themselves, and the world, will be turned upside down. Brimming with heart and humor, Cebo Campbell’s astonishing debut novel is about the power of community and connection, about healing and self-actualization, and a reckoning with what it means to be Black in America, in both their world and ours.

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