Award-winning author David Wright Faladé ’86 delivered the Carleton convocation address — titled, “My 4-color Bic and the Constitution” — on Friday, April 18 from 10:50 to 11:50 a.m. in Skinner Chapel.

Wright Faladé is the author of the novel Black Cloud Rising (2022) and most recently The New Internationals (2025), as well as the co-author of the young adult novel Away Running (2016) and the nonfiction book Fire on the Beach: Recovering the Lost Story of Richard Etheridge and the Pea Island Lifesavers (2000), which was a New Yorker notable selection and a St. Louis-Dispatch Best Book of 2001. Wright Faladé was also a recipient of the Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Award, a prestigious award recognizing Black writers for their achievements.

He is a professor of English at the University of Illinois and the 2021–22 Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center Fellow at the New York Public Library. He has also written for The New Yorker, Village Voice, Southern Review, Newsday, and more.

Wright Faladé graduated from Carleton in 1986, completed nine months in Brazil as a Fulbright scholar, and later earned his MFA from the University of Massachusetts–Amherst.

Learn more about Carleton Convos at go.carleton.edu/convocations