Sunday, June 19 at 5:00 PM
The Bardavon 1869 Opera House
35 Market St., Poughkeepsie
No registration required.
Free general admission tickets (limit of 2 tickets per person) are available for pickup at:
- Bardavon Box Office
- Adriance Memorial Library
- Boardman Road Branch Library
- Sadie Peterson Delaney African Roots Branch Library
The Library District and the Bardavon Present: Imani Perry
Imani Perry is an award-winning author, interdisciplinary scholar, and the Hughes Rogers Professor of African American Students at Princeton University. In her new book South to America, the author seeks to change how people view the American South and, thus, the country’s history as a whole.
Perry is the author of 6 other books, including the award-winning Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry, a New York Times 2018 notable book. Her most recent book is: Breathe: A Letter to My Sons (Beacon Press, 2019) which was a finalist for the 2020 Chautauqua Prize and a finalist for the NAACP Image Award for Excellence in Nonfiction.
Imani Perry’s writing and scholarship primarily focuses on the history of Black thought, art, and imagination crafted in response to, and resistance against, the social, political and legal realities of domination in the West. She seeks to understand the processes of retrenchment after moments of social progress, and how freedom dreams are nevertheless sustained.
Please note: the Bardavon’s COVID-19 protocols require that attendees must wear masks at all times, regardless of vaccination status, except when eating and drinking. For more details on the Bardavon’s policies, visit bardavon.org.
Books will be available to purchase before and after the presentation. The talk will be followed by a Q&A and a book signing in the Bardavon lobby.
You might also be interested in:
Fighting “Slavery, that Foul Giant of Sin and Darkness”: The Black Community of the Nineteenth Century
Thursday, June 16 at 7 PM
Boardman Road Branch Library
Registration required, click here.
Free Blacks in the Queen City did not take for granted the freedom extended to them after 1827 by New York State’s gradual manumission law. They continued to identify with their enslaved brothers and sisters elsewhere in the country, and recognized their own continuing vulnerability to slave kidnappers. This talk will review the ways in which African Americans in Poughkeepsie agitated against slavery, remained vigilant against abductions of themselves, and celebrated emancipations when they occurred in the years before the Civil War.
Guest presenter is Dr. Myra Armstead, Vice President for Academic Inclusive Excellence and Lyford Paterson Edwards and Helen Gray Edwards Professor of Historical Studies at Bard College.
Masks may be required based on local health conditions.
