FAN (Family Action Network) present 3 COLSON WHITEHEAD EVENTS!
Author of the #1 NYT bestseller The Underground Railroad
Winner of the 2016 National Book Award for fiction.
MacArthur Fellow, Guggenheim Fellow, and a Pulitzer Prize finalist
"Revisiting the Underground Railroad"
EVENT #1:
Monday, February 27, 2017, 7:00 PM
Evanston Township High School Auditorium
1600 Dodge Ave., Evanston, IL 60201
EVENT #2 (RSVP required for this event):
Tuesday, February 28, 2017, 12:00 PM
Loyola University Chicago School of Law
Corboy Center, 10th Floor
25 E. Pearson St., Chicago, IL 60611
Space is limited.
RSVP to www.bit.ly/FANColsonWhitehead
EVENT #3:
Tuesday, February 28, 2017, 7:00 PM
Francis W. Parker School, Heller Auditorium
2233 N. Clark St., Chicago, IL 60614
Co-sponsored by Evanston Public Library, Evanston Township HS D202, Francis W. Parker School, Loyola University Chicago School of Law, New Trier HS D203,
Roycemore School, and Youth and Opportunity United (Y.O.U.).
Free and open to the public.
These events will NOT be videotaped.
Suitable for ages 10+.
Colson Whitehead was named a recipient of this year's Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction for his powerful novel The Underground Railroad. This huge bestseller, launched into the stratosphere by Oprah's Book Club 2.0 last August, was awarded the 2016 National Book Award for fiction in November, and is short-listed for the new $75,000 PEN America award. Perhaps most symbolic, The Underground Railroad was the last novel former President Barack Obama read while in office.
The Underground Railroad tells the story of Cora, a 15-year-old slave on a Georgia plantation who escapes to the North via an actual underground railroad, not a metaphorical one. With each stopover and resettlement, Cora's life is imperiled, the violence and terror manifesting in myriad ways, the traumas accumulating and expanding. In her New York Times review of The Underground Railroad, the Pulitzer Prize-winning literary critic Michiko Kakutani writes, "The harrowing tale he (Whitehead) tells here is the back story to the injustices African-Americans and immigrants continue to suffer today, but the back story only in the sense, as Faulkner put it, that 'the past is never dead. It's not even past'... [H]e memorializes the yearning for freedom that spurs one generation after another to persevere in the search for justice - despite threats and intimidation, despite reversals and efforts to turn back the clock. He has told a story essential to our understanding of the American past and the American present."
Mr. Whitehead is a 1991 graduate of Harvard University. His non-fiction, essays, and reviews have appeared in many publications, including The New York Times, The New Yorker, Granta, and Harper's. He has taught at several universities, including Princeton University, New York University, and Columbia University. Mr. Whitehead is a MacArthur Fellow, Guggenheim Fellow, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
Click here for complete details on all events.
