An afternoon with
NELL IRVIN PAINTER
Artist, writer and historian
Presented by the Grange Lyceum and John Brown Lives!
Sunday, June 2 at 2pm
Suggested donation $5
Reception and book-signing follow the presentation.
Books will be available for purchase from Bookstore Plus in Lake Placid.
Princeton University Emeritus Professor Nell Irvin Painter, is a bestselling and award-winning historian, critic, artist, and author of pioneering books including The History of White People; Sojourner Truth, A Life, A Symbol; and Old in Art School. At this event, she will be discussing her newest book, I Just Keep Talking: A Life in Essays, a retrospective assemblage of essays and artwork covering half a century’s worth of powerful personal narratives, unflinching criticism, and critical scholarship interrogating racism, whiteness, and the ever-shifting American political landscape.
It’s a good thing I didn’t die young. Meaning it’s a good thing for my reputation that I didn’t die during the full-blown era of White-male-default segregation, discrimination, and disappearance that wound down only yesterday. I would have disappeared from memory, just another forgotten Black woman scholar, invisible to history and to histography.
So writes Nell Irvin Painter in the introduction to I Just Keep Taking, the first collected essays in her career spanning fifty years of groundbreaking writing published in outlets ranging from The New York Times and Washington Post to The Nation and Politico. With razor-sharp humor and clarity of vision she mines the darkest truths about our country’s history while exploring its capacity to move forward.
Read or listen to an interview with Nell Painter from DesignMatters HERE.
Praise for I Just Keep Talking:
"Nell Painter is one of the most important and versatile American historians of the last half century.”
—David Blight, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom
“A gorgeously written journey through her life from her birth as a daughter of the great migration, to her retirement from academe and beyond. . .readers will learn a great deal about the country and just as much about how to craft a life of purpose and joy.” —Imani Perry, National Book Award-winning author of South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation
“Razor-sharp analysis lights up every page… Affirms Painter’s reputation as a historian and political commentator par excellence.” —Publisher’s Weekly (starred review)