Book Talk | Dimitry Léger | Death of the Soccer God
Join the Institute for Public Knowledge on Tuesday, May 12 (5:30-7:00 PM) for an event with Dimitry Léger. He will discuss his new book Death of the Soccer God with Laurent Dubois and Rowan Ricardo Phillips.
Dimitry Elias Léger was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, in 1971 and raised between Haiti and Brooklyn, N.Y. His father was a retired soccer player and his mother worked in hotels. He studied journalism at St. John’s University in New York City and worked as a staff writer at Fortune magazine and the Miami Herald and as the deputy editor of The Source magazine, the seminal hip-hop music and culture magazine, which he helped become a finalist for the National Magazine Award for General Excellence in 2000. He studied ethics and international relations in the mid-career master in public administration program at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and went on to lead communications campaigns at the United Nations, Vanguard, and the World Economic Forum, the Swiss foundation known for its annual meeting of world leaders in Davos. He is the author of the novel God Loves Haiti (HarperCollins, 2015) a finalist for Pen America’s Open Book award, and Death of the Soccer God (MCD/FSG, 2026). His writing on ethics, international affairs, and the arts has appeared in the New York Times, TIME magazine, and Granta. He lives between Brooklyn, Martinique, and Geneva.
Laurent Dubois is John L. Nau III Bicentennial Professor of the History & Principles of Democracy and the Academic Director of the Karsh Institute of Democracy at the University of Virginia. From 2007 to 2020, he was Professor of Romance Studies & History at Duke University, where he co-directed the Haiti Laboratory from 2010-13 and then founded and directed the Forum for Scholars & Publics. He is the author of seven books on Haitian and Caribbean history, music and sport. His book Soccer Empire: The World Cup and the Future of France was published in 2010 with the University of California Press, and his 2018 The Language of the Game: How to Understand Soccer with Basic Books. His writings on soccer have appeared in The Atlantic, The Nation, The New Republic, The New Yorker, and The New York Times, and he has translated the book My Black Stars by Lilian Thuram into English.
Rowan Ricardo Phillips is the author of seven previous books. He is a Distinguished Professor of English at Stony Brook University and the poetry editor of The New Republic. His book in progress, I Just Want Them to Remember Me: Black Baseball in America, will be published by FSG in 2026.