FEBRUARY 8- Minrose Gwin

REMEMBERING MEDGAR EVERS: WRITING THE LONG CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT

February 8, 2011   4 p.m.

Royall Room in the UNC Alumni Center

As a writer of fiction, memoir, and literary criticism, Minrose Gwin is most interested in how stories shape us, place us, and expand our vision of the world. Much of her scholarly work has been formed around questions of race and gender, history and memory, place and space.

Her current scholarly project, Mourning Medgar Evers, focuses on central Mississippi that same summer of 1963. It brings together imaginative writing about the life and death of NAACP field secretary Medgar Evers, whose murder in June of that year was the first political assassination of a public figure in the sixties, lighting a powder keg of racial frustration across the country. The book investigates the function of aesthetics in remembering specific events of cultural trauma.

Professor Gwin also teaches creative writing at the University of New Mexico Taos Writers’ Conference. Her two most recent books are a novel, The Queen of Palmyra (HarperCollins, Harper Perennial, 2010), and a memoir, Wishing for Snow (Louisiana State University Press, 2004), both set in her home state of Mississippi. The Queen of Palmyra, set in the summer of 1963 in segregated “Millwood,” is the first-person narrative about a young white girl’s willed, necessary blindness to her father’s racial violence, a blindness that haunts her the rest of her life. For further information about these books, go tohttp://www.minrosegwin.com/

She has also done work on gender, space, and reading and thinks of reading as a form of dislocation which opens perspective and shifts identity, with powerful consequences for gender, racial, and sexual politics.

Minrose Gwin is also an editor; she edited A Woman’s Civil War by Cornelia McDonald and was a coeditor ofThe Literature of the American South, a  Norton anthology, in addition to coediting, with Professor Fred Hobson,The Southern Literary Journal.