Friday, April 8 at 8pm ET | 5pm PT, PBS Books, in partnership with the Marygrove Conservancy and The Tuxedo Project, is excited to welcome novelist and essayist Brit Bennett as the guest author for the 33rd Annual Contemporary American Authors Lecture Series (CAALS).
About the Author
BRIT BENNETT was born and raised in Southern California. She earned her MFA in fiction at the University of Michigan. Her debut novel The Mothers was a New York Times bestseller, and her second novel The Vanishing Half was an instant #1 New York Times bestseller. Her essays have been featured in The New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review, and Jezebel.
About the Contemporary American Authors Lecture Series
Now in its thirty-third year, the Contemporary American Authors Lecture Series (CAALS) is an annual event bringing a nationally known African American authors to the Marygrove campus for a public lecture and class session or conversation.
About Marygrove Conservancy
Established in 2018, the Marygrove Conservancy is a nonprofit organization that manages operations and stewards a 53-acre campus in northwest Detroit, the site of the former Marygrove College which operated from 1905 until 2019.
A major initiative of the conservancy is managing a landmark partnership to create a cradle-to-career (P-20) educational campus on the site. The P-20 campus is being designed to be an educational, economic and civic anchor in the revitalization efforts of the Livernois-McNichols community. The campus will integrate academic experiences from early childhood to college and career with community-driven services, so that students are empowered and equipped to define their own future and that of their communities.
About The Tuxedo Project
The Tuxedo Project is a 501c3 non-profit organization whose mission is to revitalize one of Detroit’s most isolated neighborhoods by increasing access to resources centered on five anchors of community: the Arts, education, food sustainability, housing security, and economic opportunity.
Forty years ago, 7122 Tuxedo Street’s top-floor flat was the childhood home of Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Stephen Henderson. In 2012, he returned to find it like thousands of other blighted and abandoned homes in Detroit. With the help of his former classmates from University of Detroit Jesuit High School and through a partnership with the former Marygrove College, Henderson sought to affect change by renovating the house at 7122 Tuxedo and transforming the space into a functioning residence and community center.
One house. One block. One neighborhood. This humble and ambitious idea marked The Tuxedo Project’s beginning.