Baldwin, Styron, and Me

Longlisted for the 2026 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction - Finalist for the 2025 Governor General's Literary Award in Translation - Finalist for the 2025 John Glassco Translation Prize

An unlikely literary friendship from the past sheds light on the radicalization of public debate around identity, race, and censorship.

In 1961, James Baldwin spent several months in William Styron's guest house. The two wrote during the day, then spent evenings confiding in each other and talking about race in America. During one of those conversations, Baldwin is said to have convinced his friend to write, in first person, the story of the 1831 slave rebellion led by Nat Turner. The Confessions of Nat Turner was published to critical acclaim, winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1968, and also creating outrage in part of the African American community.

Decades later, the controversy around cultural appropriation, identity, and the rights and responsibilities of the writer still resonates. In Baldwin, Styron, and Me, Mélikah Abdelmoumen considers the writers' surprising yet vital friendship from her standpoint as a racialized woman torn by the often unidimensional versions of her identity put forth by today's politics and media. Considering questions of identity, race, equity, and the often contentious public debates about these topics, Abdelmoumen works to create a space where the answers are found by first learning how to listen--even in disagreement.

Mélikah Abdelmoumen was born in Chicoutimi in 1972. She lived in Lyon, France, from 2005 to 2017. She holds a PhD in literary studies from the Université de Montréal and has published many articles, short stories, novels, and essays, including Les désastrées (2013), Douze ans en France (2018), and Petite-Ville (2024). She worked as an editor with the Groupe Ville-Marie Littérature in Montreal until 2021. She was the editor-in-chief of Lettres québécoises, a Québec literary magazine, from 2021 to 2024. Baldwin, Styron, and Me is her tenth book (and the first to be translated).

Catherine Khordoc is a professor of French and Canadian Studies at Carleton University in Ottawa. She is the author of Tours et détours: Le mythe de Babel dans la littérature contemporaine (University of Ottawa Press, 2012). She also considers herself in many ways a frontier-dweller.