Name: Finding Hannah Crafts: America’s First Black Woman Novelist
Start: 2024-05-30T18:30:00-04:00
End: 2024-05-30T19:45:00-04:00
Location: 901 G St NW, Washington, DC 20001, USA

$Finding Hannah Crafts: America\u2019s First Black Woman Novelist$

“For an enslaved person, the fact that she could read and write was extraordinary. That she had escaped with a manuscript in her suitcase is astonishing.”
In 2002, Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. shocked the literary world with “The Bondwoman’s Narrative,” a 301-page novel written—he claimed—by a formerly enslaved woman: Hannah Crafts. But who was Hannah Crafts, really? How had she learned to write, and how had her manuscript, written in her own handwriting, survived? Could it be—as skeptics claimed—a hoax?
On Thursday, May 30 at 6:30 pm, join the DC History Center at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library to welcome Gregg Hecimovich, author of The Life and Times of Hannah Crafts: The True Story of the Bondwoman’s Narrative and Steven Nelson, the National Gallery of Art’s Dean of the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts. In conversation, they will explore this incredibly detailed biography and Hecimovich’s intensive research to corroborate Hannah Craft’s identity and contextualize her novel.
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PRESENTED BY:
The DC History Center and The People's Archive at the DC Public Library are teaming up to bring audiences high-profile history books with distinct DC stories. We’ve selected this book because of the depiction of pre-Civil War Washington both as Hannah Crafts would have experienced it and as she described it in her work of fiction: from the ongoing construction of the city’s monuments to DC’s Black churches as community spaces and as routes to freedom. This book also demonstrates incredible archival work, which we hope inspires you to visit our collections.
REGISTRATION
Registration is free, and walk-ins are welcome. Purchase a book at checkout ($40) to be picked up during the program. Books will not be sold onsite. Purchasing the book through registration supports our mission. Add a donation to show additional support!