On Thursday, April 18, at 6 pm in Bard Hall, Aaliyah Bilal will read from her work. She will be introduced by Rachel Ephraim, Bard Early College Hudson Valley faculty member. The reading will be followed by a discussion moderated by her editor Yahdon Israel, senior editor at Simon & Schuster. The next day, April 19, Bilal will lead a microworkshop with students from Professor Ephraim’s class, “Authors and Their Narrators: The Space Between.”

Aaliyah Bilal was born and raised in Prince George’s County, Maryland. She has degrees from Oberlin College and the University of London School of Oriental and African Studies. She’s published stories and essays with the Michigan Quarterly Review and The Rumpus. Temple Folk is her first short story collection.

Yahdon Israel is a Senior editor at Simon Schuster and founder of Literaryswag, a cultural movement that intersects literature and fashion to make books accessible.  He has written for The New Inquiry, LitHub, Poets and Writers, Vanity Fair, and The Atlantic. He teaches Creative Writing at the MFA Program at City College. Read more about Yahdon’s work here.

More about Temple Folk

Finalist for the 2023 National Book Award for Fiction

“Temple Folk is more than a special literary accomplishment, it is a gift of glorious songs. The people in the nation of Islam have not appeared very often in literature. Now, Aaliyah Bilal arrives with a splendid and grand collection of 10 stories that, with sensitivity and insight and skill, give us a world of people, our loved ones, and neighbors, who decided that life might be better in the nation. We have long needed these stories, these songs, and this gift should be praised from as many rooftops as possible.” —Edward P. Jones, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Known World

“With her landmark debut, Temple Folk, Aaliyah Bilal shines a light on a Black American community that, for all its influence, hasn’t been given its due in fiction—the Nation of Islam. The deftness of her storytelling allows total access to characters struggling to practice faith as a means of survival. This is a truly masterful work, full of compassion, humor, nuance, and great insight.” –Emily Raboteau, Author of Searching for Zion

Read more about Aaliyah’s work here.