Dear RSF:

Please join us on Wednesday, December 12th at 11:00 in the library for a presentation by Alexis Okeowo, entitled “A Story of Alabama: Telling an Alternate History of the Country’s Most Contentious State.”

Visiting Journalist Alexis Okeowo is a staff writer for The New Yorker. Her previous book, “A Moonless, Starless Sky: Ordinary Women and Men Fighting Extremism in Africa,” Hachette (2017), wove together separate narrative stories from four different African countries, illustrating with both empathy and objectivity the challenges and struggles residents of those countries confront in conducting their daily lives.

Her work, supported by the Foundation this year, moves on to American soil, where her focus is on the state of Alabama. Okeowo’s new book views Alabama as providing a stage for the both the best and worst results of the American experiment. She seeks to trace an untraditional timeline of the state’s history and present, starting with the predictable – the Indian massacres, slavery – and then moving through to the unexpected, like the wave of immigrant students who came to study during the Civil Rights Movement, the rise of the Indian casino business, the surge in Latino migrants, and the liberal revival and moderate questioning that began during the Roy Moore election.