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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
June 2, 2009
Contact:
, Austin Public Library, (512) 974-7379
Fax: (512) 974-7442
Austin’s African American Book Festival '09
Date: Saturday, June 27, 2009
Time: 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m.
Location: Carver Branch, 1161 Angelina Street
Contact Number: 974-1010
 Join us for the third annual Austin African American Book Festival, a family oriented fun filled day celebrating of African American literature and the joy of reading. The festival takes place on Saturday, June 27 at the Carver Branch of the Austin Public Library, 1161 Angelina Street, and the Carver Museum and Cultural Center next door, and features the 2009 Pulitzer Prize winner Annette Gordon Reed, bestselling authors Bernice McFadden and Anita Richmond Bunkley, and Harvard Business School Grad Carla Harris. Arts and crafts, book giveaways for kids, and an array of other activities, including Austin storyteller Carla Nickerson, will engage and entertain young book lovers. Vendors include booksellers, and other small business owners. There will be spoken word presentations by local poets. The Austin African American Book Festival is free and open to the public. For more information please call 512- 974-1010 or visit www.cityofaustin.org/library.
About Annette Gordon Reed
Annette Gordon-Reed is the author of The Hemingses of Monticello for which she won the 2008 National Book Award and the 2009 Pulitzer Prize in History. Gordon-Reed has also co-written with Vernon Jordan Vernon Can Read!: A Memoir and is author of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy. She is a law professor at New York Law School and teaches history at Rutgers University. Gordon-Reed graduated from Harvard Law School. She will be giving a talk at 11:00 a.m. in the Boyd Vance Theater at the Carver Museum and Cultural Center. Read Jeff Salamon's interview with Annette Gordon-Reed, Inside a founding father's other family, in the the Austin American Statesman.
About Carla A. Harris
Carla A. Harris, Managing Director in Global Capital Markets at Morgan Stanley, is the author of Expect to Win: Proven Strategies for Success from a Wall Street Vet. Her name has appeared on Fortune Magazine’s list of the “50 Most Powerful Black Executives in Corporate America” and Black Enterprise Magazine’s “Top 50 African Americans on Wall Street”. Harris will discuss and sign her book at 10:00 a.m. at the Carver Library. The Austin Chapter of the Black MBA Association will host a free breakfast for this event.
About Anita Richmond Bunkley
Anita Richmond Bunkley, bestselling author of Emily, The Yellow Rose, Black Gold, Wild Embers, and Starlight Passage will read and sign at 12:30 p.m. inside the Carver Branch.
About Bernice McFadden
Bernice McFadden’s work has been compared to Toni Morrison. Her best known work, Sugar, was her first published novel. She has also written Warmest December, Nowhere Is A Place, Loving Donovan, and Camilla’s Rose. McFadden will be reading at 1:30 p.m. inside the Carver Library.
The Austin African American Book Festival is funded and supported in part by the City of Austin through the Cultural Arts Division and by a grant from the Texas Commission on the Arts and an award from the National Endowment for the Arts, which believes that a great nation deserves great art. This program was also made possible in part with a grant from Humanities Texas, the state affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities; H-E-B and support from Wells Fargo Bank.
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