Program Description
Event Details
Readings with Authors Joan Brooks Baker & Sallie Bingham
Taken by Indians
by Sallie Bingham
The Soup with the Chicken's Eyes
by Joan Brooks Baker
Joan Brooks Baker was born in 1944, and brought up in New York City by dyed-in-the-wool Southern parents. At age eleven she was taught how to make a pinhole camera with a shoebox, which she took, along with her deep curiosity, down the city’s streets, Central Park or just simply the subway. She came to understand that she was making mental snapshots in order to create sense out of the chaos in her life.
Joan has exhibited her photographs and photographic monoprints in several galleries, mainly in Santa Fe, New Mexico and New York City. The United Nations “70 women from 50 countries” exhibit featured Joan's images of India’s female garbage workers.
Her work has been featured in Cross by Kelly Klein, Searching for Mary Magdalene: A Journey Through Art and Literature by Jane Lahr, Ms. Magazine, Men’s Vogue and Town & Country magazine, The Dead Mule of Southern Literature; Symbols of Faith, A Visual Journey to the Historic Churches of New Mexico, to name a few. Her last photographic project, and one that spanned several years, was of The Black Madonna. In her search to find the meaning of this icon’s legend, Joan began to relate the Black Madonna’s narrative to women she admired and to herself.
It was through the Black Madonna presentation that she was inspired to write her memoir, The Magnolia Code.
Learn more about Joan Brooks Baker at https://www.joanbrooksbaker.com/
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Sallie Bingham is a writer, teacher, feminist activist, and philanthropist.
Sallie’s first novel was published by Houghton Mifflin in 1961. It was followed by four collections of short stories; her most recent book, from Sarabande Books in 2022, is titled Little Brother: A Memoir. In 2021, she had two books published: the first a biography of Doris Duke titled The Silver Swan: In Search of Doris Duke from Farrar, Straus and Giroux as well as a collection of short stories and a play titled Treason: A Sallie Bingham Reader also from Sarabande Books. She has published six additional novels, three collections of poetry, numerous plays (produced off-Broadway and regionally), and the well-known family memoir, Passion and Prejudice (Knopf, 1989). For a complete listing of Sallie’s work, visit her bibliography page.
Her short stories have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, New Letters, Plainswoman, Plainsong, Greensboro Review, Negative Capability, The Connecticut Review, and Southwest Review, among others, and have been anthologized in Best American Short Stories, Forty Best Stories from Mademoiselle, Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards, and The Harvard Advocate Centennial Anthology. She has received fellowships from Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.
Sallie has worked as a book editor for The Courier-Journal in Louisville and has been a director of the National Book Critics Circle. She is founder of the Kentucky Foundation for Women, which published The American Voice, and the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture at Duke University.
She was born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky, and currently resides in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Learn more about Sallie Bingham at https://salliebingham.com/