Toni Cade Bambara Lecture Series
Pearl Cleage (Class of 1971), former Cosby Endowed Chair, is an Atlanta-based writer whose works include five novels, What Looks Like Crazy On An Ordinary Day , I Wish I Had A Red Dress, Some Things I Never Thought I'd Do, and her most recent novel Baby Brother’s Blues was the first pick of the new ESSENCE Book Club and an NAACP Image Awared winner for fiction in 2007; more than a dozen plays, including “Flyin' West,” “Blues for an Alabama Sky,” “Hospice,” and “Bourbon at the Border,”and most recently, "A Song for Coretta"; two books of essays, Mad at Miles: A Blackwoman's Guide to Truth and Deals With the Devil and Other Reasons to Riot; as well as a book of short fiction, The Brass Bed and Other Stories. She is also a performance artist, collaborating frequently with her husband, Zaron W. Burnett, Jr., under the title Live at Club Zebra! The two have performed sold out shows at both the National Black Theatre Festival in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and The National Black Arts Festival in Atlanta, Georgia.
Alice Lovelace - art activist and community organizer, is the Associate Regional Director of the Southeastern Region for the American Friends Service Committee. Alice is co-editor at the online journal In Motion Magazine and covers issues of art and democracy in her column, Art Changes.
In the late seventies, Alice worked shoulder to shoulder with Toni Cade Bambara in Atlanta to organize the Southern Collective of African American Writers (SCAWW). Alice credits Toni with training her to be an arts activist/educator/organizer/agent for positive social change.
In her work as a community organizer, she uses the arts as a tool for social change. She is a cultural worker, spoken word artists, performance artists, playwright, essayist, lecturer, teacher, and producer; using all these vehicles to organize.
As an artist/activist, Alice uses her words and voice to lift up the struggle for social and economic justice then connects them to a historic global movement. As an educator, she has taught poetry to thousands of students, teachers and elders as a tool of empowerment.
Dr. Valerie Ann Johnson, Mott Professor and Director of Africana Women’s Studies at Bennett College for Women since August 2004, previously taught in the African and Afro-American Studies Department at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. She received a Ph.D. from the joint program in Medical Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley and the University of California, San Francisco. She also holds a B.A. in Sociology from Spelman College and M.A. in Sociology from Atlanta University (now Clark Atlanta University).
Among her passions as an activist is in environmental justice work and to that end she is a member of the North Carolina Environmental Justice Network, board member of ACA-Net (Academics, Community, Agencies Network), president of CCNC Foundation (Conservation Council of North Carolina) as well as board member of CCNC. Dr. Johnson has also been elected to the board of directors for two organizations: “Our Children’s Place” – a residential initiative for children with incarcerated mothers and the Scarritt Bennett Center in Nashville, Tennessee.
