Author event with Sagnaw Valley State University historian Eric Gardner

Wednesday, February 25, 12 – 1PM

Delta College main campus, room N007

Also available online via Zoom: email hlc@delta.edu

In a career of over fifty years, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper fought for abolition, women’s suffrage, Black suffrage, civil rights, and temperance. She fashioned a sense of literature that engaged deeply with both her activism and questions of aesthetics, craft, and art. While Harper was well-known during her lifetime, many twentieth-century critics dismissed or ignored her. She has often been reduced to an abolitionist poet who later, decades after emancipation, published a notable novel. Her massive efforts amid the Civil War and Reconstruction have been especially understudied and misunderstood.

Author Eric Gardner of Saginaw Valley State University explores how this major African American author-activist claimed these nation-shaking moments as her own.