Inprint and the Houston Museum of African American Culture present Texas native and Pulitzer Prize winner Annette Gordon-Reed for a special livestream event in honor of Juneteenth

Annette Gordon-Reed

Inprint and the Houston Museum of African American Culture (HMAAC) present renowned historian Annette Gordon-Reed with her new book On Juneteenth in a special livestream event on Monday, June 21, 7-8 pm CT. Free tickets, required to access the livestream, are available through the Inprint website, inprinthouston.org. Gordon-Reed, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award for The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family, will read an excerpt from On Juneteenth and then converse with award-winning journalist for ABC-13 News Melanie Lawson. Weaving together American history and personal memoir, On Juneteenth reflects on Gordon-Reed’s experience growing up in racially segregated Conroe, Texas, 40 miles north of Houston. In connection with this event, Kindred Stories, Houston’s newest Black-owned bookstore, is offering On Juneteenth at a 10% discount. For more information, visit inprinthouston.org or call 713.521.2026.

“In collaboration with our friends at HMAAC, we are thrilled and honored to present the great historian Annette Gordon-Reed in celebration of her new book On Juneteenth, which is both essential reading for our time and profoundly relevant to this region,” says Rich Levy, Inprint Executive Director. “And who better to lead this conversation than our friend Melanie Lawson, superb journalist and Houston native.”

“We are always delighted to work with Inprint, and especially on this occasion to present Annette Gordon-Reed to her home state audience, in collaboration with Kindred Stories,” adds John Guess, HMAAC CEO Emeritus.

Texas native Annette Gordon-Reed is, according to H.W. Brands, “one of the most important American historians of all time.” Her breakout work The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in History and the National Book Award for Nonfiction. She is also the author of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy and Andrew Johnson. She co-wrote Vernon Can Read: A Memoir with civil rights leader, lawyer, and presidential advisor Vernon E. Jordan, Jr. and “The Most Blessed Patriarchs”: Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination with historian Peter S. Onuf. Her honors include a MacArthur Fellowship, the National Humanities Medal, the Frederick Douglas Book Prize, the George Washington Book Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award.

In this new book, “the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian interweaves her personal, trailblazing history with that of her home state to pierce many of the false narratives we learned as children about the country’s treatment of African Americans… with beautiful prose, breathtaking stories, and painful memories,” writes Daina Ramey Berry, the Oliver H. Radkey Regents Professor of History and Chair of the History Department at the University of Texas at Austin, for The Washington Post. Kirkus calls it “a concise personal and scholarly history that avoids academic jargon as it illuminates emotional truths.” Gordon-Reed is currently the Carl M. Loeb University Professor at Harvard Law School and lives in New York, New York and Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Inprint, a leading Houston-based nonprofit literary organization established in 1983, is dedicated to inspiring readers and writers. The Houston Museum of African American Culture, established in 2000 to promote the vibrancy of African and African American art forms, is the most visited African American cultural asset in Houston.

This presentation, a special event of the 2020/2021 40th anniversary Inprint Margarett Root Brown Reading Series, is made possible by generous underwriting support from The Brown Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Inprint also receives support from The Jerry C. Dearing Family Foundation, Houston Endowment, The City of Houston through the Houston Arts Alliance, and the Texas Commission on the Arts.