Author Talk and Live Violin Performance with Dr. Melanie R. Hill
About this Event
Author Talk and Live Violin Performance with Dr. Melanie R. Hill
Join us for an inspiring Author Talk featuring Dr. Melanie R. Hill and her new book, Colored Women Sittin' on High: Womanist Sermonic Practice in Literature and Music, complemented by a captivating Live Violin Performance. This unique event offers a wonderful opportunity to engage with Dr. Hill’s insights and enjoy beautiful music in person.
Date & Time: October 17, 2026 at 5:00 PM (Eastern Daylight Time)
Venue: Kindred Thoughts Bookstore
Don’t miss this special occasion to celebrate literature and music together in a warm, welcoming setting!
ABOUT THE BOOK:
From blue-note turmoil to grace-note power, Black women preachers stand tall. In Colored Women Sittin' on High, Melanie R. Hill offers a new perspective on the art of the sermon in African American literature, music, and theology. Drawing on the womanist cadence of Alice Walker in literature and the rhythmical flow of named womanist theologians, Hill makes interventions at the intersections of African American literary criticism, music, and religious studies.
Pushing against the patriarchal dominance that often exists in religious spaces, Hill argues that Black women's religious practice creates a "sermonic space" that thrives inside and outside the church, allowing for a critique of sexism and anti-Black racism. She examines literature by writers such as Zora Neale Hurston and James Baldwin, music by Aretha Franklin and Ms. Lauryn Hill, and sermons by theologians Ruby Sales and Vashti M. McKenzie, and she takes readers into a sermonic artwork of artists, preachers, and freedom movement activists who are, as Hill contends, the greatest "virtuosic alchemists" of our time.
Order book here.
About Dr. Melanie R. Hill:
Melanie R. Hill, Ph.D. is Named Term Chair Andrew W. Mellon Associate Professor of Global Racial Justice and Associate Professor of American Literature with tenure with specializations in African American Literature, Black Music Performance, and Womanist Literature/Thought/Theology in the Department of English at Rutgers University, Newark. Her newly released book, Colored Women Sittin’ on High: Womanist Sermonic Practice in Literature and Music(UNC Press), explores the literary and musicological histories of Black preaching women. Colored Women Sittin’ on High has been officially endorsed and praised by both Alice Walker, author of The Color Purple, and civil rights legend, Ruby Sales. In October 2025, Dr. Hill was inducted into the Martin Luther King, Jr. Collegium of Scholars at Morehouse College in Atlanta, GA. In addition to her scholarship, Dr. Hill is a classically-trained Gospel Soul Violinist who has performed in concert in Paris, France, at the White House on two occasions under the Obama administration, Carnegie Hall, the Kennedy Center, the Apollo Theater, the Staples Center, the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, and for the late Pope Francis’s Papal Mass.
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