Imani Perry, the National Book Award-winning author of South to America, presents Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People, a poignant, beautiful meditation on how throughout history Blackness has been intertwined with the color blue.

Blue skies and blue water offer hope, but blue is also the color of deep melancholy and heartache that echoes Louis Armstrong’s question, “What did I do to be so Black and blue?” In this book, Perry draws deeply from her own life as well as from art and history, using the world’s favorite color as a springboard for a riveting emotional, cultural, and spiritual journey—an examination of race and Blackness that transcends politics or ideology.

Perry is a 2023 MacArthur Fellow and the Henry A. Morss, Jr. and Elisabeth W. Morss Professor of Studies of Women, Gender and Sexuality and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. Perry's books include Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry, winner of the 2019 Bograd-Weld Biography Prize from the Pen America Foundation, and Breathe: A Letter to My Sons, among others.

Presented in honor of the DMA’s Black History Month Celebration Weekend,Perry will be inconversation with Johnica Rivers.