Join us for a book signing and talk by Tara T. Green, author of the recently published biography Love, Activism and the Respectable Life of Alice Dunbar-Nelson.
Once shadowed by marriage to famed poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, Alice Ruth Moore Dunbar-Nelson (1875-1935) has attracted a growing body of scholarship recognizing her accomplishments as a poet, author, journalist, educator and champion of social justice. After leaving her abusive husband in 1902, Dunbar-Nelson became a long-time resident of Wilmington, Delaware. She found her new home in an evolving segregated city of tense race relations. Along with her mother, sister, nieces and nephew, Dunbar-Nelson built a life that involved teaching at Howard School; co-founding organizations; and co-editing The Wilmington Advocate, a progressive Black newspaper.
Green’s biography is the first book-length look at this major figure in Black women's history, covering Dunbar-Nelson’s life from the post-reconstruction era through the Harlem Renaissance.
Drawing on her research using the Alice Dunbar-Nelson papers, which are housed in Special Collections at the University of Delaware, and the national Black newspaper database, Green will highlight Dunbar-Nelson's early years in Black Wilmington.
The biography will be available on site for purchase and signing.
This event is co-sponsored by the Department of English, the Department of History, and the Department of Women & Gender Studies.
Tara T. Green (she/her) is professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies at the University of North Carolina where she teaches literature and gender studies courses. In addition to Love, Activism, and the Respectable Life of Alice Dunbar-Nelson, she is the author of See Me Naked: Black Women Defining Pleasure During the Interwar Era (2022), Reimagining the Middle Passage: Black Resistance in Literature, Television, and Song (2018), and A Fatherless Child: Autobiographical Perspectives of African American Men (2009).
