Hargrett Rare Book & Manuscript Library

A University of Georgia collaboration that presented Georgia’s incarceration history in an exhibition and on stage is being honored as one of the top public history projects in the nation.

Archivists with UGA’s special collections libraries partnered with theatre and dance faculty on campus and at Spelman College to engage students in an exploration of reports, correspondence, newsfilm, photographs and other original materials from archival collections documenting the history of convict labor in Georgia. Over the course of three semesters, students and faculty created a devised theatrical performance grounded in that history.

The UGA Libraries host award-winning author Tayari Jones Feb. 7 in celebration of the paperback launch of An American Marriage. Jones was a 2018 inductee into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame, but was unable to attend the fall ceremony.  The award will be presented at this event, which is co-sponsored by Avid Bookshop.

The program is from 7-9 p.m. at the Foundry Ballroom (295 E. Dougherty Street, Athens, GA 30606). Tickets are $22 and include a paperback copy of either An American Marriage or Silver Sparrow. Books will be distributed upon check-in to the event.

An American Marriage was selected for the The New York Times' and The Washington Post's Most Notable of 2018 lists and was named 2018 Book of the Year by Apple Books. TIME Magazine selected it as the 2018 Best Fiction of the Year

The Women’s March on Washington, D.C. in January 2017 comes into focus in a new exhibit at the University of Georgia’s Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library. “Nevertheless, She Resisted: Documenting the Women’s Marches” opens to the public Friday, Jan. 18. 

The annual display of the UGA Charter will be Jan. 28  through Feb. 2 to mark Founders' Day (Jan. 27), the anniversary of the document's signing. To protect the ink of the parchment manuscript from further fading it is displayed to the public only once a year in the Hargrett Library of the Richard B. Russell Building Special Collections Libraries.

Freda Scott Giles, UGA associate professor emeritus of theater and film studies and African-American studies, will present this year's Founders' Day Lecture on "W.E.B. Du Bois: Dramatist” at 1:30 p.m. in the UGA Chapel.

Step right up for a look behind the curtain at the shows that once dazzled American audiences in a new exhibit at the Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library. “Under the Big Top: The American Circus and Traveling Tent Shows,” opens to the public on Friday, Jan. 18 at the Richard B. Russell Building Special Collections Libraries.

To celebrate the 200th anniversary of the publication of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the UGA Libraries are joining forces with the English Department to offer a host of Frankenstein related activities in the month of October. The Frankenreads events are part of an international celebration organized by the Keats-Shelley Association of America.

On Halloween, Wednesday October 31st our Frankenread will begin in UGA’s Main Library at 8am and continue until 6pm. In the spirit of the novel’s multiple voices, readers will be drawn from across the campus and the larger Athens community. The Frankenread will be accompanied by a slideshow of images drawn from popular culture and curated by Dr. Christopher Pizzino (UGA English).

Patricia Cahill will deliver the 2018 Symposium on the Book’s plenary talk, entitled “Archival Homeplaces: Shakespeare and African American Performance in the Early Twentieth Century.”

Cahill is associate professor of English at Emory University, where she specializes in Shakespeare and early modern literature, especially drama. She is the author of Unto the Breach: Martial Formations, Historical Trauma, and the Early Modern Stage (OUP, 2008). She has also published articles and book chapters on such subjects as military technology and mathematics, animal matter and affect theory, and the senses in performance. She is currently working on two projects: a book that examines the affective dynamics of early modern stage properties, especially animal skins, and a study of Black Shakespeare and the Jim Crow South.

The symposium is Friday, Oct. 12, at 2:30 p.m. in Room 277 of the Russell Special Collections Libraries.

The 2018 Georgia Writers Hall of Fame events will begin Nov. 4 with a panel discussion of a new book on the late novelist Pat Conroy.

Published by the University of Georgia Press, Our Prince of Scribes: Writers Remember Pat Conroy is a collection of stories from fellow writers he nurtured, including Grammy winners, National Book Award winners, James Beard Foundation winners and New York Times best-sellers, along with a cadre of friends and family members. At 3 p.m. contributors Terry Kay, Cynthia Graubart, and Cliff Graubart will participate in the discussion moderated by the book's editor Jonathan Haupt.

Conroy was inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame in 2004.

Pulitzer-prize winner Hank Klibanoff is the featured speaker Sept. 25 at the celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Lillian Smith Book Awards.

This celebration will commemorate a half-century tradition, currently a collaboration of the Southern Regional Council, the University of Georgia Libraries, Piedmont college, and the Georgia Center for the Book, of recognizing authors whose books represent outstanding achievements demonstrating through high literary merit and moral vision an honest representation of the South, its people, its problems, and its promise.

The program, open free to the public, begins at 6:30 p.m. at the National Center for Civil and Human Rights in Atlanta. A reception will follow.

The 2018 Lillian Smith Book Awards were presented Sunday, Sept. 2, to James Forman Jr and Nancy MacLean at the Decatur Book Festival. 

Forman’s Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America examines how mass incarceration, which affects people of color disproportionately, stems from the war on crime that began in the 1970s and was supported by many African American leaders in the nation’s urban centers. He is shown being congratulated by UGA University Librarian Toby Graham, right.