Staff WriterQBR The Black Book Review and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture will present the 10th anniversary of the Harlem Book Fair on Saturday, July 19th on West 135th Street between Malcolm X Boulevard (Lenox Avenue) and Frederick Douglass Boulevard (8th Ave.) in New York City from 11:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m.
This year’s book fair expands to feature members directly from the African Diaspora. In collaboration with The Consulate General of Jamaica, we will hear from Beverley Manley, the former Prime Minister’s wife and member of Jamaica’s elite families. Ms. Manley will be joined by acclaimed Nationwide radio Jamaica West Indies commentator Cliff Hughes’ in a candid, nationally televised discussion of her new tell-all book “The Manley Memoirs”. This will be her first NYC appearance discussing the book. The interview will be held Saturday, July 19th at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture 515 Malcolm X Blvd corner of 135th St from 2:15pm – 3:15pm, and broadcasted on C-Span’s BookTV.
As a young girl, starved of her mother’s love because she was darker than her siblings, and forced to do housework while her sisters relaxed, Beverley was a modern-day Cinderella. Told incessantly that she was good for nothing, she defied her mother’s prophecy by becoming a household name in local radio, television, and on stage. It was her path at the then Jamaica Broadcasting Corporation that lead to Michael Manley and the Jamaica House. Marriage to Michael also leads to her political awakening. Beverley assumed an activist role in the governing Peoples National Party (PNP), becoming embroiled in the ideological politics of the 1970s that would eventually lead to her estrangement from Michael, the destruction of their marriage, her flight into the arms of a rival lover and finally to a self-imposed exile in the US, where she took refuge from the ire of the Jamaican elite for daring to walk out on one of their own.
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