Our Events

Reading Group

Love, Activism, and the Incredible Life of Alice Dunbar-Nelson with Tara T. Green

Monday, February 13, 2023 - 12:00 PM | On the Zoom Meetings platform | open to the public | $75 for the four sessions or $20 per session | registration required

Born in New Orleans in 1875, Alice Dunbar-Nelson was a pioneering activist, writer, suffragist, and educator. Tara T. Green's Love, Activism, and the Respectable Life of Alice Dunbar-Nelson is the first book-length look at this major figure in Black women's history.

This seminar will focus on three phases of her life—her personal and activist life in New Orleans, New York and Wilmington, DE. It will give participants an opportunity to read diary entries and little-known fiction. Participants will learn how Dunbar-Nelson tried to balance her work as a teacher, suffragist, and anti-lynching advocate with her three marriages and affairs with women.

Recommended reading: the author’s book, Love, Activism, and the Respectable Life of Alice Dunbar-Nelson - available here in the Library's collection or here from the publisher.

This event took place over four sessions February-April 2023.

Tara T. Green, PhD is Founding Department Chair and CLASS Professor of African American Studies at the University of Houston, where she teaches Black Women’s studies and literature courses. She is the author of Reimagining the Middle Passage: Black Resistance in Literature, Television, and Song (2018), the award-winning A Fatherless Child: Autobiographical Perspectives of African American Men (2009), and See Me Naked: Black Women Defining Pleasure during the Interwar Era (2022), and she is also the editor of two books. Professor Green is from the New Orleans area. For more about her visit: www.drtaratgreen.com.


This event is part of the Library's Black Literature Matters programming, generously supported by the Florence Gould Foundation.