Best-selling Author Barbara Brown Taylor will moderate the first Lillian E. Smith Symposium on Arts and Social Change at Piedmont College's Athens campus on March 14
Taylor, an Episcopal priest, is the Butman Professor of Religion at Piedmont College.
During the 1940s, the late Lillian E. Smith of Clayton was a writer and humanitarian who focused attention on segregation in the South. Her home in Clayton, is now an educational center operated by Piedmont College, and director Craig Amason said the Athens symposium grew out of a desire to expose a new generation to the ideas that Smith explored in her novels and memoirs.
Smith is best known for her 1944 novel, ‘Strange Fruit,’ which explored race relations in the South.
The symposium will be held from 8:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. March 14, at the Piedmont campus located at 595 Prince Avenue, Athens. Registration is $45. For more information, visit piedmont.edu/symp.
Speakers include CNN correspondent John Blake; Princeton professor and author Dr. Imani Perry; and former U.S. Congressman C. Donald Johnson, currently director of the Dean Rusk Center for International Law and Policy in Athens.
The symposium will feature a discussion of the 1964 murder of Lemuel Penn near Colbert.
