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BACHE Visiting Writers Series Returns to Birmingham-Southern College
BACHE Visiting Writers Series Returns to Birmingham-Southern College
For Immediate Release
Sep. 26, 2019
The BACHE Visiting Writers Series returns to Birmingham-Southern College Oct. 1 with the first speaker of its 2019-2020 series. Author Natashia Deón at 11 a.m. in Munger Hall Auditorium. The event is free and open to the public.
Deón’s 2016 novel, Grace, follows Naomi, a young woman who — after seeing her mother murdered when she is fifteen — flees slavery in 1840s Alabama only to encounter a new set of horrors. Naomi’s only daughter, Josey, will never know her mother. Josey will live to hear of the Emancipation Proclamation but will experience the news not as liberation, but brutality. Deón’s novel claws and chips its way into facets of the American and human experience where glimmers of hope would seem impossible to find. But the novel is also, not surprisingly, about grace, which is “getting a good thing, even when you don’t deserve it.”
Publisher’s Weekly called Deón’s debut powerful, a “moving, mystical family saga,” and praised Deón’s “lyrical language and convincing, unobtrusive dialect to build portraits of each tragic individual as the sprawling story moves to its redemptive end.”
Grace won the 2017 American Library Association's Black Caucus Award for Best Debut Fiction and was named a New York Times Top Book 2016, a Kirkus Reviews best book of 2016, and a favorite book of 2016 by The Root.
Deón is a criminal attorney, a law professor, and the founder of Redeemed, an organization that “pairs professional writers with those who have been convicted of crimes.” She is also the creator of the reading series Dirty Laundry Lit and The Table. Her work has appeared in Time, American Short Fiction, The LA Review of Books, and other places.
The 2019-2020 series, sponsored by the Birmingham Area Consortium for Higher Education (BACHE), kicks off Sept. 30 at University of Montevallo. In addition to BSC and the University of Montevallo, BACHE members include Miles College, Samford University, and University of Alabama at Birmingham. Each year, the BACHE series features three renowned writers, introducing students to a diverse group of authors, subject matter, and style.
Also featured in the 2019-2020 series are award-winning poet Ann Fisher-Wirth and photographer and author Maude Schuyler Clay.
Media contact: Amy Bickers, Director of Communications, (205) 226-4922 or [email protected]
About Birmingham-Southern College
Birmingham-Southern College is a selective residential liberal arts college enrolling approximately 1,300 undergraduate students. BSC is included in Pope’s Colleges that Change Lives and is a sheltering institution for Phi Beta Kappa. The college’s curriculum is based on close faculty-student interaction in teaching, advising, and research. For more on the college’s faculty, students, educational mission, and national reputation visit www.bsc.edu.