WIT Festival presents: David W. Blight and Deval Patrick in conversation with Imani Perry

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$15 – $45

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Thursday, September 11 at noon

Public Sale:  

Friday, September 12 at noon

My voice, my pen, my vote.

“Nations reel and stagger on their way; they make hideous mistakes; they commit frightful wrongs; they do great and beautiful things. And shall we not best guide humanity by telling the truth about all of this?” This question, posed by W.E.B. Du Bois, arises with new urgency as executive orders and other government actions serve to undermine the practice of history in classrooms, on campus, and within institutions like the Smithsonian, the Library of Congress, and the National Parks.

How else to create a more just and compassionate future than by exploring, preserving, and sharing the full complexity of our collective past?

Join award-winning scholar David W. Blight (Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom) and former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick—two models of public service and public spirit—as they discuss how to foster historical understanding and civil discourse in a contentious political climate. The conversation is moderated by Harvard professor Imani Perry, whose new book is Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People.

“There’s more goodness in the hearts of people, more decency in the behavior and conscience of Americans, than is expressed in our federal government right now,” Governor Patrick said recently. “It’s a reminder of how important it is that we, all of us, not be bystanders, but get involved.”

How a country translates its past is often subject to political forces, but Blight sees the Trump Administration’s push for a singular patriotic education as both an assault on academic freedom and as endangering our democracy.

“A genuine democracy not only tolerates the reinterpretation of its past, but thrives upon it,” Blight has written. “We need history that can get us marching, but also render us awed by how much there is to learn.”

The conversation between David W. Blight and Deval Patrick is part of the 2025 WIT Literary Festival, an annual celebration of writers, their work, and the vital role they play in society presented by the Authors Guild Foundation. By bringing writers and readers together for a weekend of timely conversations, the WIT Literary Festival reflects the belief that a rich culture of free expression is essential to a thriving democracy. Join us from Sept 25-28 for conversations between M. Gessen and Michael S. Roth, Torrey Peters and Chase Strangio, Hanif Abdurraqib and Imani Perry, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and Sanaz Toossi, Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde and Marilynne Robinson, and more.  

David W. Blight is Sterling Professor of History and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University. He is the author or editor of more than a dozen books, including Yale and Slavery: A History (2024);  Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom (2018); American Oracle: The Civil War in the Civil Rights Era (2013); A Slave No More: Two Post-Civil War Slave Narratives (2007); Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (2001; and annotated editions of Douglass’s first two autobiographies. He has worked on Douglass for much of his professional life, and has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the Bancroft Prize, the Abraham Lincoln Prize, and the Frederick Douglass Prize, among others. He writes frequently for the popular press, including The New Republic,  The Atlantic Monthly, and The New York Times. he New York Times, and many other journals. He is an elected member of the American Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, which honored him with the Gold Medal in History in 2020.  

Deval Patrick, who served as the Governor of Massachusetts from 2007 to 2015, is a senior partner of The Vistria Group. He is also a professor of practice at the Harvard Kennedy School and was the co-director of its Center for Public Leadership from 2022 to 2024. He is the founder of Bain Capital Double Impact and was its managing partner from 2015 to 2019. Under his leadership as governor, Massachusetts ranked first in the nation in student achievement, energy efficiency, health-care coverage, veterans’ services, and entrepreneurship, and emerged from recession to achieve a 25-year high in employment. He has been a senior executive in two Fortune 50 companies, a partner in two Boston law firms, and the Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights in the United States Justice Department. He is the founder and honorary chair of the Our Generation Speaks, founder and honorary chair of Project 351, and former co-chair of the Future of Tech Commission. He is a Rockefeller Fellow, a Crown Fellow of the Aspen Institute, and the author of two books: A Reason to Believe: Lessons from an Improbable Life (2011) and Faith in the Dream: A Call to the Nation to Reclaim American Values (2012). He and his family have called western Massachusetts their home for more than 25 years. 

Imani Perry won the National Book Award in 2022 for South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation. Her most recent book is Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People (2025). She is also the author of Breathe: A Letter to My Sons (2019); Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry (2018), for which she received the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography, The Phi Beta Kappa Christian Gauss Award, the Lambda Literary Award and the Shilts-Grahn Award; and May We Forever Stand: A History of the Black National Anthem (2018), which won the 2019 John Hope Franklin Book Award. She is a professor in African American Studies and in the Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University. 

Learn more about the WIT Festival and see the full line-up at authorsguild.org