Events under 'Special Events'

Beverly Lowry, Author of Deer Creek Drive: A Reckoning of Memory and Murder in the Mississippi Delta

In Conversation with Novelist Deborah Johnson

https://www.muw.edu/a9c8b58b-251f-499e-8e03-e68879b06487" width="52" height="79" />Lowry was ten and lived mere miles from where society matron Idella Thompson was viciously murdered in 1948. In Deer Creek Drive, she tells a story of white privilege that still has ramifications and reflects on the brutal crime, its aftermath, and the ways it clarified her own upbringing in Mississippi. Lowry is the author of six novels and four other works of nonfiction and her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, and many other publications. She has received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Texas Institute of Letters, and the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters. As Lowry reads from her work and talks with Mississippi novelist Deborah Johnson, this will be a great opportunity to learn about the research process and a writer’s creative journey through memory into storytelling.

Nissan Auditorium

Abigail Franks

Programs and Policy Coordinator, Southeast Climate & Energy Network (SCEN)

Building Climate Resilience/Dealing with Eco-Grief

A graduate of the Honors College at University of Alabama-Birmingham, Franks is a Udall Scholar and climate policy advocate. While at UAB, she founded WEARE (We Envision Alabamian Renewable Energy), She is now Programs and Policy Coordinator for the Southeast Climate & Energy Network (SCEN), where she works with local communities and drafts climate mitigation and adaptation policies to make the South a sustainable and resilient region. She is also host of the podcast Climate Justice Y’all. She will discuss her work on climate resilience and lead a discussion about climate anxiety, eco-grief, and all the ways we work together to face the climate crisis.

Dr. Thomas S. Bremer

Associate Professor of Religious Studies, Rhodes College

American Sacred: Religion in the National Parks 

Religion has been a constant and essential presence in U.S. national parks, although usually not obvious or even visible. Dr. Bremer will discuss the roles of religion in the history of national parks and the importance of the parks in the culture of the U.S. A long-time scholar of religion and tourism, he is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Rhodes College and author of Blessed with Tourists: The Borderlands of Religion and Tourism in San Antonio and Formed From This Soil: An Introduction to the Diverse History of Religion in AmericaI.