Historic Hope Plantation is pleased to announce a book reading and signing at the Roanoke-Chowan Visitor’s Center on the Hope campus on Sunday, November 17th, 2012 at 2.00 PM. The event, which is co-sponsored by the University of North Carolina Press and the Bertie County Arts Council, will feature a presentation and book signing by UNC-CH Professor, Dr. Heather Andrea Williams.
Dr. Williams will read from and sign copies of her 2012 publication Help Me to Find My People. This work examines the effects of slavery’s separation of black families and explores the heartbreaking stories of separation and the long, usually unsuccessful journeys toward reunification.
Help Me to Find My People was named an Editor’s Choice by the ‘New York Times Book Review’ in July 2012. The reviewer noted that Williams “is the rare scholar who writes history with such tenderness that her words can bring a reader to tears.” Her book was featured on North Carolina Bookwatch on Friday November 2nd, on UNC TV.
She is also the author of Self Taught: African American Education in Slavery and Freedom, published by UNC Press in 2007. Self Taught won the 2006 Lillian Smith Book Award, Southern Regional Council; the 2006 New Scholar Book Award, American Educational Research Association, Division F; the 2005 George A. and Jeanne S. DeLong Book Prize, Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing; and was a 2006 Honor Book, Black Caucus of the American Library Association.
Dr. Williams is a professor in the History Department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She earned her PhD in American Studies from Yale University and her J.D. from Harvard Law School. She is a former Assistant Attorney General with the New York State Attorney General’s New York City Office and was a Woodrow Wilson Postdoctoral Fellow at the Kahn Liberal Arts Institute and Afro-American Studies Department at Smith College in Northampton, MA.
Turner Bond Sutton, President of the Historic Hope Foundation Board, is “excited about the book reading and signing with Dr. Williams. I hope that this will be the first of many that we can host.”
The event is free and open to the public. A reception will follow the book signing.
Copies of both of Dr. Williams’ books will be available for purchase, with a percentage of the sales going to benefit Hope Plantation.
