Author Talk: Dr. Noliwe Rooks on Mary McLeod Bethune

The Author Series Committee is honored to host Dr. Noliwe Rooks of Brown University. Dr. Rooks will be discussing her book A Passionate Mind in Relentless Pursuit: The Vision of Mary McLeod Bethune, an intimate and searching account of the life and legacy of one of America’s towering educators, a woman who dared to center the progress of Black women and girls in the larger struggle for political and social liberation.

Copies of A Passionate Mind in Relentless Pursuit will be provided by Detroit's own Source Booksellers!

About Dr. Rooks: An interdisciplinary scholar, Noliwe Rooks is the L. Herbert Ballou University Professor of Africana Studies, and the chair of Africana Studies at Brown University. Her work explores how race and gender both impact and are impacted by popular culture, social history and political life in the United States. She works on the cultural and racial implications of beauty, fashion and adornment; race, capitalism and education, and the urban politics of food and cannabis production.

The author of six books and numerous articles, essays and Op-Ed’s, Rooks has received research funding from the Ford Foundation, the Mellon Foundation and the Woodrow Wilson School among others. She lectures frequently at colleges and universities around the country and is a regular contributor to popular outlets such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Time Magazine and NPR.

Rooks’ fourth book, in which she coined the term “segrenomics,” is Cutting School: Privatization, Segregation, and the End of Public Education which won an award for non-fiction from the Hurston/Wright Foundation. Her most current book is A Passionate Mind in Relentless Pursuit: The Vision of Mary McLeod Bethune and her forthcoming one is Integrated: How American Schools Failed Black Children. It is about how the implementation of integration/desegregation strategies impacted Black children and communities and explores four generations of her family history with integration.

Questions? Email [email protected] for help!

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