She Persisted: Women of Letters and the American South

Works of art and literature have long inspired one another. Whether the Bloomsbury Group, the Aesthetic Movement, or Black Mountain College, their evolution is often contemporaneous. Inspired by Central to Their Lives: Southern Women Artists in the Johnson Collection, and in partnership with woman-owed bookstore Itinerant Literate, join us in conversation with Professor and Director of Southern Studies at the College of Charleston, Julia Eichelberger, recipient of the National Book Award for Poetry, Nikky Finney, and author of the Charleston-based novel The Cigar Factory, Michele Moore, as we consider the literary traditions and social landscape that gave rise to voices like Eudora Welty, Zora Neale Hurston, and Harper Lee, and that continue to inspire women writers and artists across the south.

This event is SOLD OUT.

About Our Speakers

Nikky Finney was born by the sea in South Carolina and raised during the Civil Rights, Black Power, and Black Arts Movements. She is the author of On Wings Made of Gauze; Rice; The World Is Round; and Head Off & Split, which won the National Book Award for Poetry in 2011. Her new collection of poems, Love Child’s Hotbed of Occasional Poetry, is forthcoming in 2020 from TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University Press.

Michele Moore has served as a fellow in the English Department at Piedmont College in Demorest, Georgia. She was a 2006 finalist for the Bellwether Prize for Literature. Her creative nonfiction has been broadcast on Georgia Public Radio and published in the Louisville Review, Habersham Review, ACM (Another Chicago Magazine), Groundwater, and O, Georgia. She has also won awards and grants from the Kentucky Foundation for Women, the Kentucky Arts Council, and the Kentucky Chapter of the National Society of Arts and Letters.

Julia Eichelberger began teaching at the College in 1992 and is currently Marybelle Higgins Howe Professor of Southern Literature. She has taught a variety of courses in American literature, including Southern literature, postwar American poetry, African American literature, 20th-century American fiction, Jewish American literature, and Charleston writers, as well as first-year writing.

About Our Partners

Itinerant Literate Books opened in 2015 as a mobile and pop-up bookstore and in 2018 opened the flagship bricks-and-mortar Bookstop in Park Circle. Their name is reflective of their mission: they believe stories are powerful vehicles for growth and that access to knowledge should not be limited by zip code or district. Itinerant Literate offers a diverse selection of brand-new books for people of all ages and are committed to making new stories and insight accessible to everyone in the community.