The UT Humanities Center and Union Ave Books welcome author DaMaris B. Hill to our Public Books Masterclass series!

The UTHC and Union Ave Books will host a free, online Public Books Masterclass about DaMaris B. Hill’s narrative-in-verse, A Bound Woman Is A Dangerous Thing: The Incarceration of African American Women from Harriet Tubman to Sandra Bland. The discussion will feature the author, who will read from her work and discuss her text with UT English professor Katy Chiles. "Zoom in" to participate in a discussion of the book with the author and a UTK professor!

From Harriet Tubman to Assata Shakur, Ida B. Wells to Sandra Bland and Black Lives Matter, black women freedom fighters have braved violence, scorn, despair, and isolation in order to lodge their protests. In A Bound Woman Is a Dangerous Thing, DaMaris B. Hill honors their experiences with at times harrowing, at times hopeful responses in narrative verse, presenting bitter, unflinching and passionate odes to Zora Neale Hurston, Lucille Clifton, Fannie Lou Hamer, Grace Jones, Eartha Kitt, and others who engaged the legacy of struggle.

How it works:

• Buy a copy of A Bound Woman is a Dangerous Thing from Union Ave Books or another bookstore
• When you have your book, RSVP for the online masterclass discussion at RSVP@unionavebooks.com and you will be sent a link to the Zoom discussion.*

DaMaris B. Hill, Ph.D., is an associate professor of creative writing and Africana studies at the University of Kentucky. She is the author of A Bound Woman Is a Dangerous Thing (2020 NAACP Image Award nominee for Outstanding Literary Work in Poetry); The Fluid Boundaries of Suffrage and Jim Crow: Staking Claims in the American Heartland; and \ Vi-zə-bəl \ \ Teks-chərs \(Visible Textures), a chapbook project of poems inspired by GPS technologies. She has held fellowships at The MacDowell Colony, the Vermont Studio Center, and Bread Loaf Writers Conference, and she has a keen interest in the work of Toni Morrison and theories regarding ‘rememory’ as a philosophy and aesthetic practice. damarishill.com.

Katy Chiles, Ph.D., is an associate professor of English at UT Knoxville and teaches and writes about African American and Native American literature, early American literature and culture, and critical race theory. Her research has been supported by the Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. She is the author of Transformable Race: Surprising Metamorphoses in the Literatures of Early America and is currently working on a book project that examines race and collaboration in early American literature.

his free and public book discussion is part of a new partnership between the UT Humanities Center and Union Avenue Books, downtown Knoxville’s Independent Bookstore. The Public Books Masterclass meetings feature a UT faculty expert who will lead the discussion and provide key insights on texts. Check out our entire series discussion schedule at our website, on UTHC social media, or at Union Ave Books media sites or their weekly newsletter.

*In the event of technical difficulties, we cannot provide book refunds or technical assistance.