This coming month, four of my past faculty members have agreed to come to our house to have dinner with you! This will not be a big lecture in 1938; instead, we want to gather small groups of interested students to talk with one faculty member casually both about the work they do, and their life through and outside academia (how they came to their field, subject area, and position; what they engage with in their free time, and anything else you want to know from or about them!)

 

Lorene Cary, Senior Lecturer in English, will be coming on Thursday, October 17 at 6pm. She is the author of two memoirs, Black Ice about her time in a prestigious boarding school, and the recent publication Ladysitting: My Year with Nana at the End of Her Century, as well as the novels The Price of a Child about an 1855 fugitive liberated from the Philadelphia ferry (which was chosen as the very first One Book One Philadelphia selection), a girlfriend novel, Pride, and If Sons, Then Heirs, a contemporary love story whose geography traces the African-American Great Migration. She is also the founder of Art Sanctuary, a local nonprofit, and a former member of the Philadelphia School Reform Commission, as well as the founder of the platform SafeKidsStories.com, which depicts stories of youth safety, peace, and non-violence with the clarity and imagination that we usually reserve for the depiction of violence and conflict. I have published on SafeKidsStories, as well as many other Penn students and local K-12 students from the region. Find more info at https://www.english.upenn.edu/people/lorene-cary!