Speaker Series
Fall 2024
All Clarke Speaker Series events will take place in the Sarah and Daniel Opperman Auditorium, beginning at 7:00 pm. All programs are free and open to the public. Please contact us at clarke@cmich.edu or (989) 774-3864 if you are in need of accommodation or if you have any questions.
DAVID AND EUNICE SUTHERLAND BURGESS LECTURE
Christopher Paul Curtis
Making of an Author 101
Tuesday, September 24, 7:00 pm
Join us for an evening with the award-winning author, Christopher Paul Curtis. In his talk, he will trace his path to becoming a writer of historical fiction for young people and the importance certain people played along the way. Born in Flint, Michigan, in 1953, Curtis was working on an auto assembly line when he began writing. His novels center on African-American families and tackle tough issues with humor and honesty. The Watsons Go to Birmingham - 1963 (Delacorte Press, 1995) and Bud, Not Buddy (Delacorte, 1999), his first two published novels, both received the most prestigious awards in all of children’s literature, the Newberry Honor and the Coretta Scott King Honor. This year, Curtis received the American Library Association’s Coretta Scott King-Virginia Hamilton Lifetime Achievement Award which recognizes outstanding African-American authors, illustrators, and practitioners for lasting and significant contributions to youth or young adult literature.
A reception in the Clarke will follow this event.
The David and Eunice Sutherland Burgess Lecture was endowed by the Burgesses to support authors, storytellers, and scholars to visit campus and talk about the enduring importance of storytelling.
Dr. Blaire Morseau, Michigan State University
As Sacred to Us: Simon Pokagon's Birch Bark Stories in Their Contexts
Tuesday, October 29, 7:00 pm
Blaire Morseau is a citizen of the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi with ancestral ties to the Grand River Bands of Ottawa, and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at Michigan State University. In this presentation, she will discuss a recently released edited volume featuring the collection of rare antique birch bark books written by nineteenth century Potawatomi author, Simon Pokagon titled, As Sacred to Us: Simon Pokagon’s Birch Bark Stories in their Contexts. Experts in Native literary traditions, history, Algonquian languages, the Michigan landscape, and materials conservation illuminate the thousands of years of Indigenous knowledge that Pokagon elevated in his stories.
A reception in the Clarke will follow this event.
