Author lecture: 'Speaking Truth to Power'

LAWRENCE — A National Book Critics Circle Award finalist will present “Speaking Truth to Power: on The Other Side, Courage, and Voice” as a powerful contribution to the University of Kansas campus conversation about sexual violence.

KU alumna Lacy Johnson will give the John F. Eberhardt Memorial Lecture at 7 p.m. today, April 23, in the Malott Room of the Kansas Union. There will be a book-signing after the lecture.

Johnson is a Houston-based author, curator, professor and activist. Her book “The Other Side” (Tin House, 2014) is a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Autobiography and an Edgar Award in Best Fact Crime, and it was a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writer Selection for 2014. She is also author of “Trespasses: A Memoir” (University of Iowa Press, 2012). 

As a writer and artist she has been awarded grants and fellowships from the Houston Arts Alliance, the Sustainable Arts Foundation, Kansas Arts Commission, the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts, Inprint and Millay Colony for the Arts. Her work has appeared in Tin House, Fourth Genre, Creative Nonfiction, TriQuarterly, and has been anthologized in The Racial Imaginary and Literature: The Human Experience. She currently teaches interdisciplinary art at the University of Houston.
 
The event is co-sponsored by the Department of English, Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies and the Ermal Garinger Academic Resource Center at KU.