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LAWRENCE -- The Hall Center for the Humanities announces the Frances and Floyd Horowitz lecturer for 2002-03, Paule Marshall. Her lecture in the Humanities Lecture Series will take place at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 20, in the Kansas Union ballroom.
She also will lead two seminars at 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. Friday, Feb. 21, in the Malott Room at the Kansas Union. All the events are free and open to the public.
As part of the Humanities Lecture Series, Marshall will discuss "Triangular Quest for Self and Community: Brooklyn-Barbados-Benin." When taken together, these three geographies constitute the principal compass points on the literary map of Marshall's fiction. From the autobiographical "Brown Girl, Brownstones," the story of an adolescent girl growing up in a New York West Indian community, to "The Fisher King," her work has charted a course that deliberately reverses the triangular route of the slave trade. Characters in her stories move backward in time, memory and history, undertaking journeys that are at once physical, psychological and spiritual, as well as political.
Marshall's most eloquent statement of her belief in African-Americans' need to rediscover their heritage was "Praisesong for the Widow," the novel that established her reputation as a major writer. Her work celebrates black immigrant communities, Afro-Diasporic culture and black women.
Marshall was born in Brooklyn in 1929 to parents who had recently migrated to New York from Barbados. She has taught at Yale, Columbia, Cornell and Oxford universities. She holds a distinguished chair in creative writing at New York University and has received a MacArthur Foundation fellowship, a Guggenheim fellowship and the Rosenthal Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
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