F200.
KC in Black and White: Contrasting Fictions by Vincent Carter and Evan Connell
Friday, February 9, 2024
1:45 pm to 3:00 pm
2024 brings the centennial of two very different writers born in Kansas City. Evan S. Connell emerged from a prosperous white family. Vincent O. Carter grew up on the Black side of town, far removed from Connell’s world. Their respective fictional portrayals of Kansas City—Connell’s two novels of the Bridge family; Carter’s posthumous novel Such Sweet Thunder—serve in yin-yang fashion to illuminate how economic and racial differences operate in works of the imagination.
Participants
Steve Paul's biography of Evan S. Connell, Literary Alchemist, won the 2022 best biography award from the Society of Midland Authors. A career journalist now writing biography and poetry, he is president of the Biographers International Org. A New England native, he has long lived in Kansas City.
Jesse McCarthy is assistant professor in the departments of English and of African and African American studies at Harvard University. He is the author of the essay collection, Who Will Pay Reparations on My Soul?, winner of the 2022 Whiting Award for Nonfiction, and a novel, The Fugitivities.
Gemma Sieff is a writer and editor. She interviewed Evan S. Connell for the Paris Review in 2014, and published an essay about Connell's life and work in Harper's Magazine in 2022. She lives in New York City.
