Revisiting the Underground Railroad
- February 28, 2017
- 12:00 PM - 1:30 CST
- Corboy Law Center, Ceremonial Courtroom
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School of Law
Miranda Johnson, mjohnson11@luc.edu - Free
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Open to the public and the entire Loyola community
Open to the public. - Add to calendar
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Details
Loyola's Civitas ChildLaw Center and the Family Action Network
present Revisiting The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead, author of the New York Times bestseller The Underground Railroad, a 2016 National Book Award-winning novel. He is a MacArthur Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow, and a Pulitzer Prize finalist.Philip H. Corboy Law Center
Power Rogers & Smith Ceremonial Courtroom, 10th Floor
25 E. Pearson Street, Chicago
Colson Whitehead was recently named a recipient of this year's Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction for his powerful novel The Underground Railroad. This huge bestseller, launched into the stratosphere by Oprah's Book Club 2.0 last August, was awarded the 2016 National Book Award for fiction in November, and is short-listed for the new $75,000 PEN America award. The Underground Railroad was also the last novel former President Barack Obama read while in office.
The Underground Railroad tells the story of Cora, a 15-year-old slave on a Georgia plantation who escapes to the North via an actual underground railroad, not a metaphorical one. With each stopover and resettlement, Cora's life is imperiled, the violence and terror manifesting in myriad ways, the traumas accumulating and expanding. In her New York Times review of The Underground Railroad, the Pulitzer Prize-winning literary critic Michiko Kakutani writes, The harrowing tale [Whitehead] tells here is the back story to the injustices African-Americans and immigrants continue to suffer today, but the back story only in the sense, as Faulkner put it, that 'the past is never dead. It's not even past - [H]e memorializes the yearning for freedom that spurs one generation after another to persevere in the search for justice - despite threats and intimidation, despite reversals and efforts to turn back the clock. He has told a story essential to our understanding of the American past and the American present.The presentation is open to the public and the entire Loyola University Chicago community. Registration is required.
