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A Discussion with Author Tess Chakkalakal

in partnership with the University of Waterloo

For Adults

About the Event

Join us for an engaging discussion with Tess Chakkalakal, author of A Matter of Complexion: The Life and Fictions of Charles W. Chesnutt, as she speaks with moderator Dr. Vay. Whether you're interested in doing some learning over your lunch hour or a student looking to explore literary history, this is a great opportunity to hear about Chakkalakal’s work and insights.

Presented in partnership with the University of Waterloo English Language and Literature Department.

About the Author

Tess Chakkalakal teaches African-American and American Literature at Bowdoin College. Her writing has appeared in The New England Quarterly, J19, American Literary History, and many others. She is the author of Novel Bondage: Slavery, Marriage, and Freedom in Nineteenth-Century American (Illinois UP, 2011) and co-editor of Jim Crow, Literature, and the Legacy of Sutton E. Griggs (University of Georgia Press, 2013) and Imperium in Imperio: A Critical Edition (West Virginia UP, 2022) She lives in Brunswick, Maine.

About the Book

In A Matter of Complexion, Tess Chakkalakal gives readers the first comprehensive biography of Charles W. Chesnutt. A complex and talented man, Chesnutt was born in 1858 in Cleveland to parents who were considered “mixed race.” He spent his early life in North Carolina after the Civil War. Though light-skinned, Chesnutt remained a member of the Black community throughout his life. He studied among students at the State Colored Normal School who were formerly enslaved. He became a teacher in rural North Carolina during Reconstruction. His life in the South of those years, the issue of race, and how he himself identified as Black informed much of his later writing. He went on to become the first Black writer whose stories appeared in The Atlantic Monthly and whose books were published by Houghton Mifflin.

Through his literary work, as a writer, critic, and speaker, Chesnutt transformed the publishing world by crossing racial barriers that divided Black writers from white and seamlessly including both Black and white characters in his writing. In A Matter of Complexion Chakkalakal pens the biography of a poor teacher raised in rural North Carolina during Reconstruction who became the first professional African American writer to break into the all-white literary establishment and win admirers as diverse as William Dean Howells, Booker T. Washington, Ida B. Wells, and Lorraine Hansberry.

About the Moderator

DR. VAY, moderating the event, is a professor in the departments of Communication Arts and English Language and Literature at the University of Waterloo, where he is also the inaugural director of Black Studies.  He research focuses on the intersections of race and masculinity in US and Canadian literature, rhetoric, performance, and sociolinguistics. He is currently completing a book of essays on teaching Black language and literature in what he terms Ameri-Canada.

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Programmer: Charlie