All university-sponsored, non-Athletics events and gatherings are suspended through April 30 due to COVID-19.
Author Jaquira Díaz will read from her memoir, Ordinary Girls, and discuss its writing on Thursday, March 12, as part of the annual Harry C. Howard Jr. Lecture hosted by the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities at Vanderbilt.
The talk, “Ordinary Girls: Tacit Borders, Racialized and Gendered Violence, and the Corporeal Policing of Black and Brown Girls” will begin at 4:10 p.m. in the Central Library Community Room. The event is free and open to the public, and all are invited to attend.
Díaz will give a short reading followed by a discussion about writing Ordinary Girls: A Memoir, which recounts Díaz’s life growing up in poverty as a gay Afro-Latina during Miami Beach’s economic blight, and in Puerto Rico’s over-policed government housing projects. A discussion about writing about girls and girlhood, and the intersections of poverty, race, mental illness and sexuality, will follow.
The Harry C. Howard Jr. Lecture Series was established in 1994 through the endowment of Mr. and Mrs. Thomas E. Nash Jr. and Mr. and Mrs. George D. Renfro, all of Asheville, North Carolina. The annual lecture honors Harry C. Howard Jr., who earned his bachelor’s degree at Vanderbilt in 1951, and allows the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities to bring an outstanding scholar to Vanderbilt to deliver a lecture on a significant topic in the humanities.
For more information, visit the Harry C. Howard Jr. Lecture Series webpage.