Toby Jones and Vanessa Onwuemezi deliver Lucy Sante's Six Sermons for Bob Dylan

In August 2016 I received an email from Jeff Rosen, Bob Dylan’s majordomo. I had been getting occasional writing assignments from Bob through Jeff for years, and they were extremely various: speeches, press kits, prefaces, a Buick commercial. Now he explained that he and Bob had been discussing a film project, to focus on his “Gospel Years,” 1979–1980. They had some great footage—not the rather stiff performances intended for an unmade TV special, but the rougher takes made for pick-ups. Bob had the thought that he’d like to interrupt the footage with sermons delivered by an actor. Would I consider writing [them]?

Lucy Sante, 2024

Inspired by sermons recorded in Black churches in the 1920s and 1930s, Sante’s are soul poems for 21st-century uncertainty.

Randy Kennedy, Ursula (Hauser & Wirth)

A special event organised and hosted by Gareth Evans in partnership with Tenement Press, actor Toby Jones and author Vanessa Onwuemezi deliver a live and unabridged reading of Lucy Sante’s Six Sermons for Bob Dylan, the fifteenth title in Tenement’s “Yellowjacket” series.

tenementpress.com/Six-Sermons-for-Bob-Dylan

Biographies

Lucy Sante’s books include Low Life (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2003), Kill All Your Darlings (Verse Chorus Press, 2007), The Other Paris (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2015), Maybe the People Would Be the Times (Verse Chorus Press, 2020), and the memoir, I Heard Her Call My Name (Heinemann, 2024).

Toby Jones is one of the most acclaimed and prolific actors of our times, working internationally with equal success in cinema, theatre, and on television and radio. His leading performance in 2024's Alan Bates vs the Post Office (ITV) was central to that dramatisation’s remarkable and ongoing public and political impact.

Vanessa Onwuemezi is a writer living in London. She was the winner of The White Review Short Story Prize, 2019 and her work has appeared in literary and art magazines, including Granta, Frieze and Art Review. Her debut short story collection, Dark Neighbourhood, was published in 2021 and was named one of the Guardian’s Best Books of 2021. She was the inaugural writer in residence at the Roberts Institute of Art residency, 2023, and Scholar of Note at the American Library in Paris, 2024.

Gareth Evans is a writer, curator, producer, publisher and event host. He works on special projects for the London Review of Books. He has co-written the film Wayfaring Stranger (Andrea Luka Zimmerman, IFF Rotterdam 2024) and produced Schneewittchen (Stanley Schtinter, IFF Rotterdam 2024).

7pm Doors
7:30pm Performance

There will be a bar available

All proceeds go to The Old Church