Eve Irvine is delighted to welcome award-winning author Rob Franklin, who will join us to talk about Great Black Hope, his acclaimed debut novel exploring race, class, respectability and belonging. Franklin wanted to write about the worlds he had spent years observing since childhood: including how class and race shape even our most intimate relationships. At the center is David Smith, a young black man from a bourgeois southern family. His education, manners, and connections give him access, but he is constantly aware of the possibility of being expelled. That tension led him to think about respectability politics and the psychological cost of constantly representing an acceptable version of oneself. Keywords for this article