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Newsmaker: Tracy K. Smith

Tracy K. Smith Photo: Andrew Kelly Author, professor, and librettist Tracy K. Smith is as prolific as she is distinguished. She has won a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (for 2011’s Life on Mars), earned a National Book Award nomination (for her 2015 memoir, Ordinary Light), and served as 2017–2019 US poet laureate. With To Free […]

Another Hidden Figure in Libra1

Autherine Lucy and lawyers Thurgood Marshall and Arthur Brooks leave the courthouse in Birmingham, Alabama, on February 29, 1956, after the court had ruled Lucy had to be reinstated as a library science student at University of Alabama but before the university’s trustees expelled her later that day. Photo: Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs […]

By the Numbers: Juneteenth

A band celebrates Juneteenth in Austin, Texas, in 1900. Photo: Austin History Center, Austin Public Library 19Date in June when Juneteenth, the oldest nationally celebrated commemoration of the ending of slavery in the US, is observed. The holiday is also sometimes called Freedom Day or Emancipation Day. 1865Year that US General Gordon Granger arrived with […]