Join Us to Discuss bell hooks’s Appalachian Elegy • The Great Books Foundation

Tuesday, February 21, 2023 • 4:00–5:00 p.m. central time • Register

Please join us for an online Shared Inquiry™ discussion of sections 1–6 of bell hooks’s meditative, confessional, and political poem Appalachian Elegy. Her work as a writer and professor focused on the Black and female experience in mid- and late-twentieth-century America and influenced thinkers and practitioners in everything from social work to philosophy. The piece we will be discussing focuses on hooks’s experience growing up in Kentucky.

Hush arbors were safe places in the deep woods where slaves could commune with each other to lift their choral voices to the heavens as they tarried for freedom. Bell hooks comes from a people who deeply connected with this country’s “backwoods” and hills in Kentucky and decided to stead in these spaces.

—dream hampton
from the introduction to Appalachian Elegy: Poetry and Place
University of Kentucky, 2012

For this free discussion, our expert Shared Inquiry discussion leaders will guide you through questions that get to the heart of hooks’s work. You will gain new perspectives and create new interpretations of your own.

If you are an experienced participant, you’ll enjoy the camaraderie that a great discussion always brings. If you are new to literature discussion, you’ll find out why your friends have encouraged you to join a Great Books group. Please join our Great Conversation that has been going on for 75 years!

We will discuss the poem as found here on the Poetry Foundation’s website, so that everyone can refer to the same text. We can’t wait to see you there!