Garden District Book Shop, A Studio in the Woods, and the New Orleans Center for the Gulf South at Tulane University present a virtual event, Life of a Klansman: A Family History in White Supremacy, author Edward Ball in conversation with Dr. Lydia Pelot-Hobbs 

Thursday, August 6, 2020

6pm CST, via Zoom 

Registration link: https://tulane.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJctcO-spjIsGNfbbNo7WsTmPzBaZ6HpmmcS

Please join us for the release of Life of a Klansman: A Family History in White Supremacy, with National Book Award-winner Edward Ball and geographer Dr. Lydia Pelot-Hobbs. Life of a Klansman (Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 8/4/20), Ball’s sixth book of non-fiction, tells the story of a member of the Ku Klux Klan, a carpenter in New Orleans who took up the cause of fanatical racism during the years after the Civil War. A descendant of the Klansman, Ball paints a portrait of his family’s anti-Black militant that is part history, part memoir rich in personal detail and critical reflection. Ball and Pelot-Hobbs will discuss this story and its significance to our current national reckoning with racism. The discussion will be followed by a q&a with attendees.

Edward Ball’s books include The Inventor and the Tycoon, about the birth of moving pictures in California, and Slaves in the Family, an account of his family’s history as slaveholders in South Carolina, which received the National Book Award for Nonfiction. He has taught at Yale University and has been awarded fellowships by the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard and the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center. He is also the recipient of a Public Scholar Award from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Lydia Pelot-Hobbs is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow with New York University’s Prison Education Program and will be joining the faculty of the Geography department and African American & Africana Studies at the University of Kentucky this fall. Her research and writing has been widely published in academic and public venues and focuses on questions of the carceral state, racial capitalism, and freedom struggles in Louisiana. She has also been active in anti-racist movements in New Orleans since Hurricane Katrina. 

In 2017-2018, Edward Ball was the inaugural Gulf South Writer in the Woods while researching and writing Life of a Klansman. The Gulf South Writer in the Woods program, a partnership between A Studio in the Woods and the New Orleans Center for the Gulf South, is designed to support the creative work, scholarship and community engagement of writers examining the Gulf South region. The 2019-2020 Gulf South Writer in the Woods is novelist Ladee Hubbard.

Garden District Book Shop is an independent bookstore that has been serving the local community for the past 40 years

Order Edward’s new book and/or CD-audio of Life of a Klansman here: https://www.gardendistrictbookshop.com/search/site/life%20of%20a%20klansman

Access select writing by Lydia Pelot-Hobbs here:  https://nyu.academia.edu/LydiaPelotHobbs