Please mark your calendars for three great UA Libraries events - a lecture, readings, and a lecture/film!

There are three great events coming up in UA Libraries after the thanksgiving break! Please be sure to mark your calendars! Visit the Libraries events page at www.lib.ua.edu/events for more information .

Tuesday November 27 at 4:30 pm, at the W.S. Hoole Special Collections Library, 2nd floor, Mary Harmon Bryant Hall

Micki McElya, Assistant Professor of American Studies, The University of Alabama will talk about her new book,
Clinging to Mammy: The Faithful Slave in Twentieth-Century America (Harvard University Press, 2007)
Download the flier at: http://www.lib.ua.edu/events/documents/mcelya_flier_001.pdf or read about the talk on the Cool@Hoole blog: http://coolathoole.blogspot.com/

McElya’s powerful and beautifully written book examines the far-reaching image of the nurturing, faithful enslaved woman and her hold on the American imagination. McElya exposes the power of the myth of ‘mammy’, an omnipresent figure in popular culture -- from film, song and literature, to advertising and our grocery store shelves, as well as in national monument proposals, child custody cases, white women’s minstrelsy, activism, anti-lynching campaigns and the Civil Rights movement . These images have existed and persisted from the era of the Civil War to today. It is through her carefully researched and thought provoking narrative that McElya argues, “if we are to reckon with the continuing legacy of slavery in the United States, we must confront the depths of our desire for mammy and recognize its full racial implications.”

Thursday November 29, in Gorgas Library room 205

Poets Randall Horton and Duriel Harris will read from their work.

Download the flier at: http://www.lib.ua.edu/events/documents/horton_harris_3.pdf

Part of a day-long celebration of African American Poetry! ***Note at 7 pm in the Ferguson Theater, you can spend the evening with poet and activist Nikki Giovanni) For more information on that event visit upissuesandideas@sa.ua.edu

Randall Horton, originally from Birmingham, Alabama, resides in Albany, New York. He is a former editor of WarpLand: A Journal of Black Literature and Ideas (Fall 2005) and co-editor of Fingernails Across the Chalkboard (Third World Press, 2006). He received his undergraduate education at both Howard University and The University of the District of Columbia (B.A. English). He has a MFA in Creative Writing with an emphasis in Poetry from Chicago State University. He is also a first year doctoral student at SUNY Albany. Randall received an Archie D. and Bertha H. Walker Foundation Summer Scholarship to attend Fine Arts Workcenter at Provincetown in 2005. He is also a Cave Canem fellow. http://www.randallhorton.com/writings.htm

Duriel E. Harris -Heralded as one of three Chicago poets for the 21st century by WBEZ Chicago Public Radio, Duriel E. Harris is a co-founder of the Black Took Collective and a Poetry Editor for Obsidian III: Literature in the African Diaspora. Drag (Elixir Press, 2003), her first book, was hailed by Black Issues Book Review as one of the best poetry volumes of the year. She is currently at work on AMNESIAC, a media arts project (poetry volume, DVD, sound recording, web site) funded in part by the UCSB Center for Black Studies Race and Technology Initiative. AMNESIAC writings appear or are forthcoming in Beyond the Frontier, Warpland, nocturnes, The Encyclopedia Project, Mixed Blood and The Ringing Ear. A performing poet/sound artist, Harris is a Cave Canem fellow, recent resident at The MacDowell Colony, and member of the free jazz ensemble Douglas Ewart & Inventions. Recent appearances include featured performances at Millennium Park (Chicago), The UCSB Multicultural Center (Santa Barbara), the Studio Museum in Harlem, The Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), and the Bowery Poetry Club (NYC) Her teaching and research interests include Modern and Contemporary American poetry, blues and funk aesthetics, oppositional/experimental poetics, trauma studies, and new media. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois, an M.A. from the Graduate Creative Writing Program at NYU and a B.A. in Literature from Yale University.

Tuesday, December 4 at 7 pm in Gorgas Library room 205

Jeff Weddle, Assistant Professor, School of Library and Information Studies will talk about his new book, and screen a documentary film
–Bohemian New Orleans: The Story of the Outsider and Loujon Press (University of Mississippi Press, 2007)
Download the flier at: http://www.lib.ua.edu/events/documents/weddle_flier.pdf

In 1960, Jon Edgar and Louise "Gypsy Lou" Webb founded Loujon Press on Royal Street in New Orleans's French Quarter. The small publishing house quickly became a giant. Heralded by the Village Voice and the New York Times as one of the best of its day, the Outsider, the press's literary review, featured, among others, Charles Bukowski, Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Robert Creeley, Denise Levertov, and Walter Lowenfels. Loujon published books by Henry Miller and two early poetry collections by Bukowski. Bohemian New Orleans traces the development of this courageous imprint and examines its place within the small press revolution of the 1960s. Drawing on correspondence from many who were published in the Outsider, back issues of the Outsider, contemporary reviews, promotional materials, and interviews, Jeff Weddle shows how the press's mandarin insistence on production quality and its eclectic editorial taste made its work nonpareil among peers in the underground. Throughout, Bohemian New Orleans reveals the messy, complex, and vagabond spirit of a lost literary age.

Wayne Ewing's documentary (Jeff Weddle helped produce this!), The Outsiders of New Orleans: Loujon Press, premiers at the Denver Film Festival on Nov. 11. Please follow the link to the Denver Film Society's webpage about the film. http://www.denverfilm.org/filmcenter/detail.aspx?id=21582

What’s Cool@Hoole? Find out at http://coolathoole.blogspot.com/