“This Here Flesh”: A Conversation with Cole Arthur Riley and Biko Mandela Gray

“I don’t have many certainties about God. I do have many hopes.” —Cole Arthur Riley

Cole Arthur Riley is a writer and poet. She is the author of the NYT bestseller, This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories that Make Us. Her writing has been featured in The Atlantic, Guernica, and The Washington Post. Cole is also the creator and writer of Black Liturgies, a project that integrates spiritual practice with Black emotion, Black literature, and the Black body.

This Here Flesh, Cole Arthur Riley’s New York Times Bestselling debut book, is a collection of stories and reflections that push us to wonder about life, God, and love. This Here Flesh is not a theology—not in any traditional sense anyway—but it is a text of theological and spiritual reflection; it is a book of poetic prose and memoir, of meditative precision and tearjerking prose. As Ashley C. Ford put it, “This is the kind of book that makes you different when you’re done.” And as Dante Stewart put it, “This Here Flesh is a gospel to what we remember.”

Join us on Monday, March 6^th, 5:30 to 7 pm in the Peter Graham Scholarly Commons in Bird Library for a conversation between Cole Arthur Riley and Syracuse University religion professor Biko Mandela Gray. The discussion will also be available live stream via Zoom. Click HERE to join the Zoom presentation.

For more information, visit Riley’s Website.