Andrew Mellon Foundation is a host of exceptional ability. Studies show that a vast majority of guests attending events by Andrew Mellon have been known to leave more elated than visitors to Santa's Workshop, The Lost of Continent of Atlantis, and the Fountain of Youth. Andrew Mellon Foundation is a host of exceptional ability. Studies show that a vast majority of guests attending events by Andrew Mellon have been known to leave more elated than visitors to Santa's Workshop, The Lost of Continent of Atlantis, and the Fountain of Youth. Andrew Mellon Foundation is a host of exceptional ability. Studies show that a vast majority of guests attending events by Andrew Mellon have been known to leave more elated than visitors to Santa's Workshop, The Lost of Continent of Atlantis, and the Fountain of Youth.
Sixty-six years ago, a 14-year-old Black boy named Emmett Till was kidnapped, tortured, and murdered by two white men in Mississippi. Till’s lynching became a catalyst for the civil rights movement, but in the decades since he was viciously killed, the act of commemorating Till has become emblematic of the anti-Black violence and racial injustice that still embroils our country – the signs that mark where his body was pulled from the Tallahatchie River have been regularly riddled with bullet holes, and his story is not always taught as central to our collective history.
Please join us for a powerful discussion in the month that would have marked Till’s 80th birthday to explore how we can best preserve, elevate, and commemorate Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley’s legacies, and ensure that future generations of Americans understand and remember the significance of their stories.
Elizabeth Alexander – decorated poet, educator, memoirist, scholar, and cultural advocate – is president of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the nation’s largest funder in arts and culture, and humanities in higher education. With more than two decades of experience leading innovative programs in education, philanthropy, and beyond, Dr. Alexander builds partnerships at Mellon to support the arts and humanities while strengthening educational institutions and cultural organizations across the world.
Dr. Alexander is Chancellor Emeritus of the Academy of American Poets, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and serves on Pulitzer Prize Board. Prior to joining Mellon, Dr. Alexander served as a director at the Ford Foundation. There, she co-designed the Art for Justice Fund—an initiative that uses art and advocacy to address the crisis of mass incarceration—and guided the organization in examining how the arts and visual storytelling can empower communities.
Over the course of a distinguished career in education, Dr. Alexander has taught and inspired a generation of students, having held distinguished professorships at Smith College, Columbia University, and Yale University, where she taught for 15 years and chaired the African American Studies Department. While an assistant professor at the University of Chicago, she was awarded the Quantrell Prize for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching.
An author or co-author of fourteen books, Dr. Alexander was twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize: for poetry with American Sublime and for biography with her 2015 memoir, The Light of the World. Her poetry and essays include Crave Radiance: New and Selected Poems 1990–2010 (2010), Power and Possibility: Essays, Reviews, Interviews (2007), American Sublime (2005), The Black Interior: Essays (2004), Antebellum Dream Book (2001), Body of Life (1996), and The Venus Hottentot (1990). Accolades for her work include the Jackson Poetry Prize, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, the George Kent Award, the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and three Pushcart Prizes for Poetry. In 2009, Dr. Alexander composed and delivered a poem, "Praise Song for the Day," for President Barack Obama's inauguration.
For more information, please visit mellon.org or on Twitter @ProfessorEA
Associate Professor of African American Studies, History, American Studies,
and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Yale University
Crystal N. Feimster, a native of North Carolina, is an Associate Professor in the Departments of African American Studies and History and the Programs of American Studies and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Yale University. She earned her Ph. D. in History from Princeton University and her BA in History and Women’s Studies from UNC-Chapel Hill. Feimster has also taught at Boston College, UNC-Chapel Hill, and Princeton. She teaches a range of courses in 19th and 20th century African American history, women’s history, and southern history. “The Long Civil Rights Movement” and “Critical Race Theory” are her most popular undergraduate courses at Yale. Feimster has received numerous teaching and mentoring awards and is an OAH Distinguished Lecturer. She has been a faculty fellow at the American Academy of Art Science in Cambridge, MA, the Dubois Institute at Harvard, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ, and Monash University in Melbourne, Australia.
Feimster is the author of Southern Horrors: Women and the Politics of Rape and Lynching (Harvard, 2009), a history of how black and white women in the US South were affected by and responded to the problems of rape and lynching in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Southern Horrors won the North East Black Studies Association 2010 W.E.B. Du Bois Book Prize and received Honorable Mention for the Organization of American Historians’ 2010 Darlene Clark Hine Award. Feimster has published peer-reviewed essays in The Journal of American History and Daedalus, has co-edited a special issue of The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era on Centennial Anniversary of Woman’s Suffrage, and has written numerous book chapters and encyclopedia entries. Her essay “Keeping a Disorderly House in Civil War Kentucky,” in the Register of the Kentucky Historical Society was awarded the Kentucky Historical Society Collins Award for best article in 2019. Feimster has also published in the New York Times, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Slate and has advised and appeared in several documentaries, such as The Rape of Recy Taylor.
Feimster is currently completing Truth Be Told: The Battle for Freedom in Civil War Era Louisiana (Oxford University Press, forthcoming), a case study that centers Louisiana as part of a formative moment in the emergence of new ideas about freedom and citizenship in America. She also working a manuscript titled, Beauty and Booty: The History of Civil War Rape.
For more information, please visit yale.edu or on Twitter @cfeimster
Kevin Young is the Andrew W. Mellon Director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. As the nation's largest museum dedicated to telling the African American story, the 19th and newest museum in the Smithsonian complex welcomes 2 million annual visitors and engages an international audience through world-class online programming and digital access to its collections.
Prior to joining the Smithsonian, Young served as the Director of the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture from 2016-2021, where he oversaw significant increases to its funding, archive acquisitions, and visitor reach. A professor for two decades, he began his career in museums and archives at Emory University in 2005, first as Curator of the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library and later as the Curator of Literary Collections, while serving as Candler Professor of English and Creative Writing.
An award-winning author of thirteen books of poetry and prose, Young is the poetry editor of the New Yorker, where he also hosts the poetry podcast. Young’s most recent works include Brown (2018) and Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts & Fake News (2017), which was longlisted for the National Book Award and a National Book Critics Circle Award; both were named New York Times Notable Books. Other noteworthy titles include Blue Laws: Selected & Uncollected Poems 1995-2015 (2016), longlisted for the National Book Award; Book of Hours (2014), winner of the Lenore Marshall Prize and his nonfiction debut The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness (2012), which won the PEN Open Award and was named a New York Times Notable Book. His third poetry collection Jelly Roll: a blues (2003) was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.
Young is also the editor of nine volumes, most recently the anthology African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle & Song, released in fall 2020 from Library of America. The collection was named one of the best books of 2020 by the New York Times Book Review, Esquire, TIME, the Atlantic, Good Morning America, O, the Oprah Magazine, The Chicago Tribune, Shelf Awareness, Lit Hub, and Barnes & Noble. The New York Times called it “monumental and rapturous”; NPR’s “Fresh Air” named it “the year’s most revelatory book”; and TIME magazine describes it as “a document both breathtaking and inspiring, historical and personal.”
Young holds a Bachelor of Arts from Harvard College and a Master of Fine Arts from Brown University. He has held a Stegner Fellowship in Poetry at Stanford, a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, and a NEA fellowship. Director Young is active across the art and cultural community. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and was named a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2020.
For more information, please visit si.edu or on Twitter @Deardarkness or @NMAAHCdirector
