Event Schedule

Jim Thorpe rose to world fame as a mythic talent who excelled at every sport. He won gold medals in the decathlon and pentathlon at the 1912 Stockholm Olympics, was an All-American football player at the Carlisle Indian School, the star of the first class of the Pro Football Hall of Fame, and played major league baseball for John McGraw’s New York Giants. Even in a golden age of sports celebrities, he was one of a kind.

Presented in partnership with Madison College, Jacquie Abram discusses her new book, HUSH MONEY, and the real life experiences that helped her create the story. All Ebony ever wanted was a chance to live the American Dream. But for someone who was living in poverty, struggling financially, and finding it hard to make ends meet, the dream was more like a fantasy with no hope of becoming a reality. That is, until the day Ebony got a job with an organization, after years of working dead end jobs, that put her one step closer to living the American Dream. But her dream quickly turned into a nightmare when she became a victim of systemic racism in employment, was stripped of all dignity, confidence, and strength, and was left with three impossible choices: suffering in silence to keep her job, resigning to keep her sanity, or waiting to be unjustly fired. Or is there a fourth path? And does Ebony have the strength to follow it?

An astounding work of fiction from New York Times bestselling author Jason Mott, always deeply honest, at times electrically funny, that goes to the heart of racism, police violence, and the hidden costs exacted upon Black Americans and America as a whole

In Jason Mott’s Hell of a Book, a Black author sets out on a cross-country publicity tour to promote his bestselling novel. That storyline drives Hell of a Book and is the scaffolding of something much larger and more urgent: Mott’s novel also tells the story of Soot, a young Black boy living in a rural town in the recent past, and The Kid, a possibly imaginary child who appears to the author on his tour.

As these characters’ stories build and converge, they astonish. For while this heartbreaking and magical book entertains and is at once about family, love of parents and children, art and money, it’s also about the nation’s reckoning with a tragic police shooting playing over and over again on the news. And with what it can mean to be Black in America.