Tope Folarin is a writer, Georgetown University professor, and the Director of the progressive think tank the Institute for Policy Studies.
His debut novel, A Particular Kind of Black Man, was published in 2019 by Simon & Schuster. He brings in roughly $20,000 a year strictly from his fiction and cultural criticism, while using his steady institutional salary as a financial shield to protect his creative freedom and resist the intense commercial pressures of the publishing industry.
In this interview Tope breaks down the reality of publishing experimental fiction. He reveals why elite academic credentials mean absolutely nothing to the literary world and how he navigated the marketing of his orphaned debut novel. He also explains his refusal to choose between serious policy work and serious literature.
If you want to learn how to fund your most ambitious artistic convictions with a demanding institutional day job this one’s for you.
My latest piece for @theatlantic is about Megha Majumdar's A Guardian and a Thief. I loved its intimacy and moral depth, but I think it leans too heavily on the immigrant-to-America frame. Link in bio.
Up next in the #ManyStoriesOneUtah Black Authors Collection is Ogden-born Nigerian author @_topefolarin
His debut novel A Particular Kind Of Black Man describes his protagonist's upbringing against a backdrop of Mormondom's persistent racism and his mother's mental health decline. Folarin narrates a coming-of-age riddled with dislocation, longing, and his trying on of a thousand different shades of Blackness. Peep our discussion guides via the link in the bio.
Excited to share my first piece as critic-at-large for @georgiareview —a review of Legacy Russell's BLACK MEME, a haunting and brilliant book about Blackness, images and online spectatorship.
This is the first in a yearlong series of essays. I'd like to thank Gerald Ma, the wonderful editor of The Georgia Review, for this opportunity. I'm using this space to explore how literature, art and culture are helping us to navigate a world that feels increasingly surreal, unstable and sacred in unexpected ways
BLACK MEME sets the tone—formally daring, philosophically sharp and spiritually restless. Much more to come. Grateful to be in dialogue with work that makes me feel and think at once. Link in bio.
Kevin Roberts has written a manual for how to be the right kind of American. In “Dawn’s Early Light,” the president of The Heritage Foundation — the conservative think tank behind Project 2025 — declares this country’s true form to be a White, Christian monoculture devoid of diversity of any kind.
“Roberts oscillates between two approaches in his book,” culture critic Tope Folarin (@_topefolarin ) writes for The Emancipator. “Either he advances supposedly commonsensical ideas that are ill-defined and unsupported by analysis or, more perniciously, he articulates a vision of an ideal America that excludes most Americans.”
Read the full review at the link in bio 🔗
A few months ago, @places_journal reached out to me with an incredible opportunity: they asked if I'd be willing to write something for them—about any place in the country, at any length. I considered writing about two places I've lived in the past, Utah and Texas, but then I settled on Washington DC. I've lived here for 16 years, far longer than anywhere else; in a very real sense this is my home. I moved here to figure out how to be a writer and do policy work, and this piece captures my struggle to merge my passions. I'd be honored if you take a look. Link is in my bio.
I spoke about immigration at the @transnationalinstitute festival in Amsterdam a few weeks before the election. As a child of immigrants, in this fraught moment, I believe it is even more important to demonstrate how important immigrants are to both America and Europe.
