Thursday, June 24, 10:00 - 11:00 am CT
Nikole Hannah-Jones is an award-winning investigative reporter who covers civil rights and racial injustice for The New York Times Magazine. She was awarded the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary for The 1619 Project, The New York Times Magazine's groundbreaking exploration of the legacy of Black Americans starting with the arrival of the first enslaved Africans in 1619. It has been read by millions, studied in classrooms all across the country, and invoked by politicians on both sides of the aisle. Its central argument, that so many aspects of contemporary American life have their roots in the system of slavery out of which the country grew, has sparked intense debate in the two years since it was published.
The 1619 Project, A New Origin Story, available November 2021, is a book that dramatically builds on the vision of the original magazine project with major expansions of the original essays, seven new essays by historians, and dozens of new poems and pieces of fiction. The book includes a significant elaboration of the project’s Pulitzer Prize-winning lead essay by Hannah-Jones and a new introduction that together, offer a stirring rebuttal to critics.
Born on the Water, also available November 2021, is a picture book from The 1619 Project chronicling the rich history of the enslaved African people who built America into a story that begins when a Black girl gets a class assignment that makes her ashamed that she doesn’t know what native country her people come from.
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Sunday, June 27, 11:30 am - 1:00 pm CT
Isabel Wilkerson, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Humanities Medal, has become a leading figure in narrative nonfiction, an interpreter of the human condition, and an impassioned voice for demonstrating how history can help us understand ourselves, our country, and our current era of upheaval.
Poetically written and brilliantly researched, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents invites us to discover the inner workings of an American hierarchy that goes far beyond the confines of race, class, or gender. A book steeped in empathy and insight, Caste explores, through layered analysis and stories of real people, the structure of an unspoken system of human ranking and reveals how our lives are still restricted by what divided us centuries ago.
Her debut work, The Warmth of Other Suns, won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Heartland Prize for Nonfiction, the Anisfield-Wolf Award for Nonfiction, the Lynton History Prize from Harvard and Columbia universities, and the Stephen Ambrose Oral History Prize and was shortlisted for both the Pen-Galbraith Literary Award and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize.