Critically acclaimed author and best seller Ayana Mathis Serves as keynote speaker for the Delta Memorial Endowment Fund, Inc.’s Literary Luncheon | Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service
Jacqueline Gail Zeledon
March 21, 2024
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Ayana Mathis, author of the New York Times Bestseller The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, headlines the Delta Memorial Endowment Fund Inc.’s (DMEF, Inc.) 46 Annual Literary Luncheon on Saturday, April 20, 2024, 11:00 a.m. at the Hyatt Regency Hotel, 333 W. Kilbourn Avenue, Milwaukee, WI 53203. Tickets for the luncheon can be purchased online at Eventbrite.com.
Since 1978, DMEF has hosted notable authors across four decades, from Octavia Butler and Maya Angelou to Pearl Cleage and Attica Locke. Proceeds from the event fund college scholarships to local graduating high school seniors and Milwaukee-area charities, including arts-based organizations. More than $500,000 has been awarded to date.
Mathis’s Milwaukee appearance comes on the heels of her 2023 release of Unsettled, which was named a Notable Book of 2023 by the Washington Post and New York Times and an Oprah Daily Best Book of the Year. Unsettled is an intense multi-generational novel set in racially and politically turbulent Philadelphia about a mother fighting for her sanity and survival. In 1985 Philadelphia, Ava becomes swept up in a charismatic movement galvanized by a radical vision to destroy systems of racial injustice and bring about a bold new way of communal living. Kirkus called it an “affecting and carefully drawn story of a family on the brink” in their starred review, saying that “Mathis powerfully evokes the heartbreak and ways best efforts are undermined by social and legal machinery.” Oprah Daily proclaimed it one of the “Best Novels of 2023”.
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In addition to her fiction work, Mathis’s nonfiction has been published in The Atlantic, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Financial Times, Rolling Stone, Glamour, and Guernica, and her book reviews frequently appear in The New York Times. She is currently pursuing her Masters of Divinity at Union Theological Seminary, Mathis’s recent essays find the author exploring the intertwining of faith and American literature, as in her multi-part New York Times essay series “Imprinted By Belief”.
Mathis has been the recipient of fellowships from the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center, the Bogliasco Foundation, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation in Italy, and the American Academy in Berlin. She was the first Black woman to be a permanent member of the faculty at the Iowa Writers Workshop and has taught in MFA Programs at Columbia University and Rutgers. She currently hosts and curates the Black Arts Dialogues series, a conversation series centered around art and Blackness hosted by the African American and African Diasporic Studies Department at Columbia University and teaches in the MFA Creative Writing Program at Hunter College.