NSU Seventh Annual Festival of the Arts Literary Conference to Feature Harvard Scholar Henry Louis Gates

Norfolk, Va. —Henry Louis Gates, a critically acclaimed nationally know scholar of African-American studies and writer, will speak at Norfolk State University from 3 to 4:30 p.m., Thursday, March 20, as part of the Seventh Annual Festival of the Arts Literary Conference.

The theme for this year’s festival is Global Eyes and Cultural Lies: Literary Images of America. The two-day conference, which will be held March 20-21, will feature a variety of workshops dealing with slavery or slave narratives, musical entertainment, guest lecturers and dramatic interpretations.

Gates is a W.E.B. DuBois Professor of Humanities, chair of the department of Afro-American Studies, and director of the W.E.B. DuBois Institute for Afro-American Research at Harvard University. He is the author of several works of literary criticism, including Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man (1997), Colored People: A Memoir (1994), which traces his childhood experiences in a small West Virginia town in the 1950s and 1960s, and Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars (1992). He was also instrumental in the establishment of the encyclopedia Encarta Africana published on CD-ROM by Microsoft (1999), and in book form by Basic Civitas Books under the title Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience (1999). He is the author of Wonders of the African World (1999), the book companion to the six-hour BBC/PBS television series of the same name. With Cornel West, Professor Gates co-authored The African American Century: How Black Americans Have Shaped Our Century (2000).

Gates earned his master’s and doctoral degrees in English Literature from Clare College at the University of Cambridge. Prior to joining the faculty of Harvard in 1991, he taught at Yale, Cornell, and Duke universities. His honors and grants include a MacArthur Foundation "genius grant" (1981), the George Polk Award for Social Commentary (1993), Chicago Tribune Heartland Award (1994), the Golden Plate Achievement Award (1995), Time magazine's "25 Most Influential Americans" list (1997), a National Humanities Medal (1998), and election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1999). 

Sponsored by the NSU Department of English and Foreign Languages, the Honors Program and the Second Major Black Writers Reading, Gates’ talk is free and open to the public. The cost for the rest of the conference is $60. 

For more information, call the Office of News and Media Relations at 823-8373.

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