Book Talk & Signing with Dr. Dwandalyn Reece

Experience Dr. Reece’s new book, Musical Crossroads: Stories Behind the Objects of African American Music, and lose yourself in the history, meaning, and power of African American Music!

Dwandalyn R. Reece is Associate Director for Curatorial Affairs at the National Museum of African American History and Culture. She brings more than 30 years of knowledge and experience in the museum field, including more than ten years at NMAAHC as Curator of Music and Performing Arts. In that role she built a collection of over 4,000 objects, curated the museum’s inaugural permanent exhibition, Musical Crossroads, for which she received the Secretary’s Research Prize in 2017, curated the museum’s grand opening music festival, Freedom Sounds, served as executive committee chair of the pan-institutional group Smithsonian Music, and co-curated the Smithsonian Year of Music initiative in 2019. Prior to her tenure with NMAAHC, Dwan worked as a Senior Program Officer at the National Endowment for the Humanities. She also has worked previously as the Assistant Director of the Louis Armstrong House Museum, Chief Curator at the Brooklyn Historical Society, and Curator at the Motown Museum in Detroit.

“Musical Crossroads models for both scholar and novice how instruments, photographs, clothing, and other forms of ephemera offer insights that affirm, but also have the potential to challenge and expand our understanding of black musicking in America. This book is essential reading for anyone interested in the history of African American music, its relationship to the formation of American identity and its larger impact on global communities.”

—Tammy L. Kernodle , University Distinguished Professor of Music, Miami University (Ohio) and immediate past president, Society for American Music

Host or Publisher American Jazz Museum