Exeter, NH (April 21, 2009)—On Thursday, May 7, author and English professor La Vinia Delois Jennings, recipient of the 2008 Toni Morrison Society Prize for Best Single-Authored Book, and featured speaker for the English Department’s annual Haley Lecture, will speak at 7:00 p.m., in the Academy Library’s Kaplanoff Periodicals Room. The Periodicals Room is on the ground floor of the library, located on Front Street. This event is free and open to the public.

Jennings is an associate professor of English at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, where she has earned several department and campus-wide accolades, most notably in 1998, when she was appointed a Fulbright Senior Lecturer at the University of Málaga in Spain. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. During her visit to the Academy, she will also speak to the English Department faculty. 

Jennings’ award-winning book, Toni Morrison and the Idea of Africa, written about the works of the Nobel laureate and Pulitzer-Prize winning author, is based partly on research trips to Haiti, West Africa, Brazil and the United States, and reveals the fundamental role African traditional religious symbols serve in Morrison’s work. Through examination of West African religions and philosophy, Jennings’ book analyzes and interprets the African themes, images and cultural aspects in Morrison’s fiction. Jennings shows how Morrison uses symbols brought to the Americas by West African slaves in her landscapes and character descriptions. Jennings’ study of such symbols illustrates and informs Morrison’s work, as well as contemporary African-American life and culture.

This publication continues Jennings’ interest in exploring the work of African-American women writers. Her earlier book on writer Alice Childress, led her to recover one of Childress’ novels, A Short Walk, which was published in 2006, with an afterward by Jennings. A fourth book by Jennings, At Home and Abroad: Historicizing Twentieth-Century Whiteness in Literature and Performance, will be published early next year.

For more information on the Haley Lecture, contact English Instructor Ellen M. Wolff at 603-777-4317. A complete list of upcoming events is available on the Phillips Exeter Academy public events line at 603-777-4309 and on our website or our news and events webpage. For directions to Phillips Exeter Academy, call 603-777-4330.