“Self-Fashioning, Resistance, & Resilience: Lessons from our Literary and Activist Foremothers”

As part of our Let’s Talk About the Humanities series, this talk will reflect on the lives and work of Sojourner Truth, Audre Lorde and Jamaican Creole Poet, Louise Bennett-Coverley, three Black women whose creative and scholarly activism have shaped the speaker’s identity as a poet-scholar with a commitment to equity, justice, autonomy and creative exploration of the “self under construction.”

All three women resisted attempts of the dominant culture to define and limit their selfhood and found ways to extend their influence beyond the limitations of race, color, culture, class and religion. This talk will highlight some of the ways in which their example and influence have helped to shape contemporary thought and the speaker’s complex identity as a mother, poet, and self-determined woman from working class Jamaican roots.