Acclaimed visual artist, sculptor, novelist, and poet, as well as the first Black American woman to receive an MFA degree from Yale, Barbara Chase-Riboud has lived in Paris for decades. “Why Paris?” written in the late 1980s, places her personal story within the larger history of Black American expatriatehood to Paris. Her recent work is inspired by the 2021 induction of American-born Josephine Baker into the Panthéon— the first Black woman to be welcomed into the French national tomb of heroes.