In this legendary series moderated by Wright President & CEO Neil A. Barclay, luminaries weigh in on the most pressing issues of our time.
Engage your mind with our curated collection of events featuring dynamic speakers chosen by Neil A. Barclay, President of the Charles H. Wright Museum. The Wright Conversations brings insightful and robust discussions to the Detroit community, addressing critical topics in civic engagement, art, history, and culture.
With National Book Award winning authors, revered environmental activists, genre-defying cartoonists, and acclaimed chefs included in this year's lineup, there are all sorts of insights in store for audiences in the months to come.
Learn more about this year's speakers below, and get your tickets today.
2025-2026 Wright Conversation Speakers
- Nina Compton | Saturday, September 13 at 2 PM
Winner of the 2018 James Beard Awards “Best Chef: South” and one of Food & Wine magazine’s "Best New Chefs 2017", Nina Compton is Chef/Owner of award-winning restaurant Compère Lapin in New Orleans’ Warehouse District. Her second restaurant venture, BABs, is located in New Orleans’ “Sliver by the River” Bywater neighborhood.
See Nina Compton on Saturday, September 13 at 2 PM. Cooking demo included. Signed cookbooks will be available for purchase.
Born and raised in St. Lucia, Nina grew up with the flavors and beauty of the Caribbean. Upon completion of secondary school in England, she returned home where she decided to pursue her dream of becoming a chef. Her wary but supportive parents arranged an internship with a friend’s hotel in Jamaica where she fell in love with the creativity and camaraderie of the kitchen. Leaving the cozy, warm winters of the Caribbean, Nina chose to move to chilly Hyde Park, NY to study at The Culinary Institute of America.
Graduating in 2001 from America’s finest culinary school, Nina began her professional journey at Daniel in New York City, working and continuing her culinary education alongside world renowned chef/restaurateur Daniel Boulud and his team.
After moving to Miami, she continued to work with the best, joining the crews of Norman Van Aken at the original/iconic Norman’s then Philippe Ruiz at Palme d’Or at the historic Biltmore Hotel. Eventually Nina moved to Casa Casuarina, a private club and boutique hotel in Miami Beach where she rose from Sous Chef to Executive Chef of the small yet highly acclaimed property.
With the excitement of the 2008 reopening of the refurbished Fontainebleau Miami Beach, combined with the chance to work with Scott Conant at Scarpetta, Nina leapt at the chance to join the pre-opening team as Sous Chef and went on to be appointed Chef de Cuisine, where she earned raves and accolades. During a star turn on BRAVO’s acclaimed cooking competition show, Top Chef New Orleans, on which she was a finalist and fan favorite, Nina fell in love with the Crescent City. Soon after, Nina moved to New Orleans where she opened her first solo restaurant, Compère Lapin, at the Old No. 77 Hotel & Chandlery in the Warehouse District.
Since opening in June 2015, Compère Lapin has received critical acclaim including The 25 Best Restaurants in New Orleans Right Now in The New York Times, Eater National's "Best Restaurants in America 2017"; a rave review in The New York Times, and Top 10 Winner of Playboy's Best New Bars in America 2016. At Compère Lapin, the talented toque creates robust dishes that meld the flavors of her Caribbean upbringing and love for French and Italian cuisine, while highlighting the Gulf and Louisiana’s beautiful indigenous ingredients.
Compton’s highly anticipated second restaurant BABs (formerly Bywater American Bistro) – which opened in March 2018 – features contemporary American fare, showcasing the chef’s culinary craftsmanship while focusing on seasonal ingredient-driven cuisine in a casual, convivial setting.
Nina’s first fast-casual concept, Nina’s Creole Cottage, opened in Spring of 2023 in the new food hall at Caesars New Orleans. Nina’s Creole Cottage Nina showcases her bold unique perspective – combining flavors from Saint Lucian cuisine with Louisiana Creole cooking with dishes like Fried Chicken and Plantain Waffles topped with Spiced Hot Honey, Shrimp and Grits, and a Fried Catfish Sandwich with Island Slaw.
Nina’s first cookbook, Kwéyòl / Creole: Recipes, Stories, and Tings from a St. Lucian Chef's Journey, was released in April 2025 by Clarkson Potter. A woman of many hats, Nina Compton also serves as the Culinary Ambassador of St. Lucia.
- Keith Knight | Thursday, November 13 at 5:30 PM
Keith Knight is a critically acclaimed comics creator and cartoonist. He has received the Comic-Con Inkpot, a CXC Master Cartoonist Award, several Glyph Awards for best comic strip, a Harvey Award and has been nominated for an Eisner, and an NAACP Image Award.
See Keith Knight on Thursday, November 13 at 5:30 PM. Signed books will be available for purchase.
Knight is the creator of the long-running autobio comic strip, The K Chronicles. One of the most widely distributed alt-weekly comic strips since its launch in the early nineties. His socio-political single panel cartoon, (Th)ink, has graced the pages of both Black newspapers/websites, and alt-weeklies. And he drew the daily syndicated strip, The Knight Life, for over a decade until Hollywood beckoned.
In 2020, Knight's life and comix were the inspiration for the comedy series, Woke, on Hulu. Knight served as co-creator, writer, and executive producer on the show. It ran for two seasons.
Knight is a graduate of Malden High School and Salem State University, where he received an honorary doctorate in 2022.
- Imani Perry | Thursday, February 5, 2026 at 5:30 PM
Born just nine years after the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama, MacArthur “Genius Grant” Fellow Imani Perry was instilled from an early age with a strong instinct for justice and progressive change. The rich interplay between history, race, law, and culture continues to inform her work as a critically-acclaimed author and professor of studies of women, gender and sexuality and of African and African American studies at Harvard University.
See Imani Perry on Thursday, February 5, 2026 at 5:30 PM. Signed books will be available for purchase.
Perry’s work reflects the deeply complex history of Black thought, art, and imagination. Her latest book, Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People, is a surprising and beautiful meditation on the color blue and its fascinating role in Black history and culture from indigo to Louis Armstrong and beyond. With starred reviews from Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, and Booklist, Perry in Black in Blues “establishes herself as the most important interpreter of Black life in our time…This is an extraordinary book” (Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., author of Begin Again and We Are the Leaders).
Her National Book Award-winning book South to America: A Journey Below the Mason Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation, is a narrative journey through the American South, in which Perry asserts that if we do indeed want to build a more humane future for the United States, we must center our concern below the Mason-Dixon Line. A “rich and imaginative tour of a crucial piece of America” (Publishers Weekly), South by America defies classification. Writing in The New York Times, Tayari Jones named it, “an essential meditation on the South, its relationship to American culture—even Americanness itself… [that] is determined to provoke a return to the other legacy of the South, the ever-urgent struggle toward freedom.” South to America was named a best book of 2022 by the New Yorker, Time, Kirkus, and Oprah Daily.
Her book Breathe: A Letter to My Sons explores the terror, grace, and beauty of coming of age as a Black person in contemporary America and what it means to parent our children in a persistently unjust world. Conceived as a letter to her young sons, this “uplifting and often lyrical meditation on living” (Booklist, starred review) offers compassion, dignity, and resilience as a balm to all Black children facing a world rife with racial hatred. As The New York Times noted, “Breathe is a parent’s unflinching demand, born of inherited trauma and love, for her children’s right simply to be possible.” The book was a finalist for the 2020 Chautauqua Prize and a finalist for the NAACP Image Award for Excellence in Nonfiction.
In each of her previous works, Perry endeavors to apply the lessons of modern history to our present struggle, whether to challenge or to celebrate. Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry is a revealing biography of one of the most gifted and charismatic—yet least understood—Black artists and intellectuals of the twentieth century; May We Forever Stand traces the history of the Black National Anthem; More Beautiful and More Terrible: The Embrace and Transcendence of Racial Inequality in the United States is an examination of contemporary practices of racial inequality that persist despite formal declarations of racial equality; Vexy Thing: On Gender and Liberation is a work of critical theory that traces the thread of modern patriarchy from the transatlantic slave trade and the age of conquest through the present day; Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop engages with the artistry, politics, and culture of hip hop.
Perry’s writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, New York Magazine, and Harper’s, among other publications. She earned her Ph.D. in American Studies from Harvard University, a JD from Harvard Law School, an LLM from Georgetown University Law Center and a BA from Yale College in Literature and American Studies.
- Catherine Coleman Flowers | Thursday, April 9, 2026 at 5:30 PM
Catherine Coleman Flowers is an internationally recognized environmental activist, MacArthur “genius” grant recipient, and author. She has dedicated her life’s work to advocating for environmental justice, primarily equal access to clean water and functional sanitation for communities across the United States.
See Catherine Coleman Flowers on Thursday, April 9, 2026 at 5:30 PM. Signed books will be available for purchase.
Get Tickets for Catherine Coleman Flowers
Founder of the Center for Rural Enterprise and Environmental Justice (CREEJ), Flowers has spent her career promoting equal access to clean water, air, sanitation and soil to reduce health and economic disparities in marginalized, rural communities.
Flowers sits on the Board of Directors for the Climate Reality Project, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and RMI, as well as serving as a Practitioner in Residence position at the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University. In 2021, her leadership and fervor in fighting for solutions to these issues led her to one of her most notable appointments yet — Vice Chair of the Biden Administration’s inaugural White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council. In 2023, she was recognized as one of TIME’s 100 Most Influential People in the world, is a TIME Earth Award winner, and was featured on Forbes’ 50 Over 50 list.
As the author of Waste: One Woman’s Fight Against America’s Dirty Secret, Flowers shares her inspiring story of advocacy, from childhood to environmental justice champion. In the book, she discusses sanitation and its correlation with systemic class, racial, and geographic prejudice that affects people across the United States. She and her work have been profiled by CBS’s 60 Minutes, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, PBS Newshour, and more.
The Wright Conversations create space for connection and reflection: with ourselves, with one another, and with ideas that demand discussion.
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