Event: Her Space, Her Place: Lasting Influences of Black Female Narration

The Ernest J. Gaines Center is pleased to invite you to the 2017 Black History Month Program, titled “Her Place, Her Space: Lasting Influences of Black Female Narration”. We are excited to work with Dr. Mona Lisa Saloy (Dillard University), Dr. Jo Davis-McElligatt (University of Louisiana at Lafayette), and the UL Lafayette chapter of the National Organization of Minority Architecture Students (NOMAS, Dr. Kiwana McClung, Advisor). The students of NOMAS were inspired by passages by The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (Ernest J. Gaines), A Raisin in the Sun (Lorraine Hansberry), and The Color Purple (Alice Walker). Drawing from passages from these three books, NOMAS built an interactive installation of their interpretation of literary descriptions of “women spaces”.

Mona Lisa Saloy, Ph.D., is an award-winning Author & Folklorist, Educator, and Scholar. She is currently the Conrad N. Hilton Endowed Professor and Coordinator of English at Dillard University. Dr. Saloy’s documentary titled “Easter Rock” premiered in Paris as a part of the Ethnografilm Festival in March 2016, and was one of 30 American films (out of 400 submissions) selected for viewing. Mona Lisa Saloy also received a National Endowment for the Humanities grant to document contemporary Black Creole Culture. Asa poet, her first book, Red Beans & Ricely Yours, won the T.S. Eliot Prize, and the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Award, and her second book Second Line Home is a collection of poems that highlights New Orleans daily life.

Joanna Davis-McElligatt, Ph.D. is Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. She is currently working on her first monograph, entitled Black and Immigrant: The New Black Diaspora in American Literature, 1945-present, in which she explores the history and representation of immigrants of African descent to the United States, and the ways in which their experiences challenge long-held assumptions about both immigrant and African American identities.

This program will take place on Feb. 21 in the Gaines Center Hallway at 6 p.m. to 8 p.m., and is free to the public.