In An Unseen Light: Black Struggles for Freedom in Memphis, Tennessee, a collection of scholarly essays, editors Aram Goudsouzian and Charles W. McKinney Jr. look at the Bluff City from emancipation through the turbulent 1960s and into the present. They will discuss An Unseen Light at two Memphis events: at the National Civil Rights Museum on April 17 and Novel on May 15.
Celebrated poet, children’s author, essayist, and activist Nikki Giovanni will deliver the Wilma Dykeman Stokely Memorial Lecture at the Bijou Theatre in Knoxville on April 5.
In a new collection of essays, Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine, Memphis native and acclaimed novelist Alan Lightman seeks to reconcile the material and the mystical.
Taylor Branch is a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and author of The King Years, a selection of excerpts from his trilogy on the civil-rights movement. Branch will deliver the keynote address of the MLK50 symposium at the University of Memphis Holiday Inn on April 3.
In A Spy in Canaan, Commercial Appeal reporter Marc Perrusquia vastly expands his 2010 front-page bombshell that identified famed civil-rights photographer Ernest Withers as a paid informant for the FBI. Perrusquia will discuss his book at Novel in Memphis on March 27, and at Parnassus Books in Nashville on April 5.
In Dangerous Mystic, Vanderbilt historian Joel Harrington explores the life of Meister Eckhart, a medieval theologian whose path to God has been embraced by New Age gurus and contemporary self-help writers. Harrington will discuss Dangerous Mystic at Parnassus Books in Nashville on March 20 at 6:30 p.m
