A talk about land, loss, and bouncing back

In her 2014 debut novel, which was later adapted for television and nominated for an NAACP Image Award, Natalie Baszile’s “Queen Sugar” follows the Bordelons, a Black family in Louisiana struggling to maintain an inherited 800-acre sugarcane plantation, amidst some of their own strained relationships with each other, and the realities of racism in the south. They are dealing with the loss of the family patriarch, trading the familiarity of one career for the foreignness of farming, and the assertion that they don’t belong in the White and male dominated farming community there.

“My dad was born in Louisiana, in a little town called Elton; so even though I’m a California native, a suburban kid, I feel that I have the right to claim the place as part of who I am,” Baszile, who spent 12 years researching and writing her book, said in an interview with Penguin Random House Canada. (She will discuss her book as part of the Black History Month programming with the University of San Diego and the San Diego Public Library from 7 to 9 p.m. Monday, in the university’s Mother Hill Reading Room; she’ll also discuss her current non-fiction book, “We Are Each Other’s Harvest: Celebrating African American Farmers, Land & Legacy.”) To further explore the...