English Department to launch Eberly Family Distinguished Lecture Series

Morgantown, WV, October 16, 2006:  The 2006-2007 season of the Eberly Family Distinguished Lecture Series will open with a discussion about the first black female novelist in America.

William L. Andrews, the E. Maynard Adams Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, will present “Rediscovering Julia Collins, The First African-American Woman Novelist,” on Wednesday, October 25 from 7:30 to 9:00 p.m. in Elizabeth Moore Hall on WVU’s Downtown Campus. The event is sponsored by the Department of English and the Eberly College of Arts and Sciences and is free and open to the public.

In 1865, The Christian Recorder, the national newspaper of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, serialized The Curse of Caste; or The Slave Bride, a novel written by Julia Collins, an African-American woman from Williamsport, Pa. The first novel ever published by a black American woman, it focuses on the lives of a mixed-race mother and daughter whose opportunities for love and marriage are threatened by slavery and caste prejudice.

The Curse of Caste is now published for the first time in book form, edited by Professor Andrews and Mitch Kachun. Copies of the book will be available for purchase following the lecture.

Professor Andrews is the author of The Literary Career of Charles W. Chesnutt and To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760-1865. He is co-editor of The Oxford Companion to African American Literature, and general editor of The Literature of the American South: A Norton Anthology and “North American Slave Narratives, A Database and Electronic Text Library.” He has edited more than 40 books on a wide range of African American literature and culture, and has lectured widely in the United States, Europe, Asia, and the Americas.

For more information, please contact John Ernest, Department of English, at John.Ernest@mail.wvu.edu or at 304-293-3107, ext. 33456.

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