Author works: A Conversation with Chimamanda Adichie

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A publishing event ten years in the making—a searing, exquisite new novel by the bestselling and award-winning author of Americanah and We Should All Be Feminists—the story of four women and their loves, longings, and desires.

Suffused with truth, wit, and compassion, this is a magnificent novel that understands the messiness of human motivation and is courageous enough to ask difficult questions. —Johanna Thomas-Corr, The Times (UK)

Award winning author and HoCoPoLitSo Writer-in-Residence, Karen Outen, will interview Chimamanda Adichie. 

Chiamaka is a Nigerian travel writer living in America. Alone in the midst of the pandemic, she recalls her past lovers and grapples with her choices and regrets. Zikora, her best friend, is a lawyer who has been successful at everything until—betrayed and brokenhearted—she must turn to the person she thought she needed least. Omelogor, Chiamaka’s bold, outspoken cousin, is a financial powerhouse in Nigeria who begins to question how well she knows herself. And Kadiatou, Chiamaka’s housekeeper, is proudly raising her daughter in America—but faces an unthinkable hardship that threatens all she has worked to achieve.

In Dream Count, Adichie trains her fierce eye on these women in a sparkling, transcendent novel that takes up the very nature of love itself. A trenchant reflection on the choices we make and those made for us, on daughters and mothers, on our interconnected world, Dream Count pulses with emotional urgency and poignant, unflinching observations of the human heart, in language that soars with beauty and power. 

It confirms Adichie’s status as one of the most exciting and dynamic writers on the literary landscape.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was born in Enugu, Nigeria in 1977. She graduated summa cum laude from Eastern Connecticut State University with a degree in Communication and Political Science. She has a Master’s Degree in Creative Writing from Johns Hopkins University and a Master of Arts degree in African History from Yale University.

Her first novel, Purple Hibiscus (2003), won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, and her second novel, Half of a Yellow Sun (2006), won the Orange Prize. Her 2013 novel Americanah won the US National Book Critics Circle Award and was named one of The New York Times Top Ten Best Books of 2013.

Her latest book Dream Count, won the Women's Prize for Fiction. 

Karen Outen's debut novel Dixon, Descending (Dutton, 2024) was a Library Journal Editor’s Pick, was a finalist for the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award, was shortlisted for the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence, and was longlisted for the Crook’s Corner Book Prize. Her fiction and essays have appeared in numerous publications including Glimmer Train, The North American Review, Essence, Scoundrel Times, Lit Hub, Electric Lit and in the anthology Where Love is Found and Mother Knows: 24 Tales of Motherhood. She received a 2018 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers Award, a Careers in the Making Fellowship from the Institute for the Humanities at the University of Michigan, and a Pew Fellowship in the Arts. She has taught writing at the University of Michigan, where she earned an MFA, and at St. Mary’s College of Maryland. 

Please register with an email address to receive an immediate registration confirmation.

Book sales and signing will take place after the event. 

We thank Arts and Letters Committee of  Columbia MD Alumnae Chapter of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority and local bookstore Backwater Books for their support of this event.