Eubanks is the Professional Education Division Herb Alpert Scholar in Residence at Berklee College of Music and Boston Conservatory at Berklee.
"W. Ralph Eubanks's book "A Place Like Mississippi" takes readers on a complete tour of the real and imagined landscapes that have inspired generations of authors. Eubanks is a native Mississippian who has spent time in all of the state’s 82 counties, and he knows its writers and its complicated history well. In "A Place Like Mississippi," Eubanks honors and explores this landscape, and this history, as he reveals the many ways it has informed the work of some of America’s most treasured authors. Supported by contemporary and historical photography, "A Place Like Mississippi" is a must-read for fans of Southern literature."
Please join the Liberal Arts and Sciences Department in welcoming Guggenheim Award winner, author, and professor Ralph Eubanks. Along with music from the region, he will take the audience on a musical and cultural tour of the Mississippi Delta landscapes that have inspired generations of writers and artists.
Wednesday, April 6, 2022 @7:30pm in the David Friend Recital Hall* (921 Boylston Street)
*The event is open only to Berklee community members who are participating in covid-19 testing protocol. All others are invited to watch the livestream.
A Place Like Mississippi by
"This is the book all of us Mississippi writers, dead and alive, need to read. It is indeed a strange but glorious sensation to see your literary and geographic lineage so beautifully and rigorously explored and valued as it's still being created." --Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy: An American Memoir The South has produced some of America's most celebrated authors, and no state more so than Mississippi. Names as diverse as Faulkner, Welty, and Ward have created a literary legacy spanning decades and stretching across lines of class, gender, and race. One thing binds together these wide- ranging perspectives--the land itself. In A Place Like Mississippi, W. Ralph Eubanks explores those ties and the ways in which the Magnolia State has fostered such a bounty of expression. The stories haven't always been easy to tell; even beautiful landscapes can't obscure a complicated history. The state's African American writers have long recounted the fight for equality, forming a lineage of powerful Black voices that continue to speak with urgency in our tumultuous times. Yet underlying those truths is also a deep affection for Mississippi's places. With the love of a native son, Eubanks pays tribute to the inspiration that can come from the lay of the land, proving that a journey through one state's literary terrain can help us better understand America as a whole
Ever Is a Long Time by
Like the renowned classics Praying for Sheetrock and North Toward Home , Ever Is a Long Time captures the spirit and feel of a small Southern town divided by racism and violence in the midst of the Civil Rights era. Part personal journey, part social and political history, this extraordinary book reveals the burden of Southern history and how that burden is carried even today in the hearts and minds of those who lived through the worst of it.Author Ralph Eubanks, whose father was a black county agent and whose mother was a schoolteacher, grew up on an eighty-acre farm on the outskirts of Mount Olive, Mississippi, a town of great pastoral beauty but also a place where the racial dividing lines were clear and where violence was always lingering in the background. Ever Is a Long Time tells his story against the backdrop of an era when churches were burned, Medgar Evers and Martin Luther King were murdered, schools were integrated forcibly, and the state of Mississippi created an agency to spy on its citizens in an effort to maintain white supremacy. Through Eubanks's evocative prose, we see and feel a side of Mississippi that has seldom been seen before. He reveals the complexities of the racial dividing lines at the time and the price many paid for what we now take for granted. With colorful stories that bring that time to life as well as interviews with those who were involved in the spying activities of the State Sovereignty Commission, Ever Is a Long Time is a poignant picture of one man coming to terms with his southern legacy.
The House at the End of the Road by
In defiance of his middle-class landowning family, a young white man named James Morgan Richardson married a lightskinned black woman, Edna Howell. It was 1914 in south Alabama. Together they eventually built a house at the dead end of a road in a rural black community. If you came there to do the Richardson family harm, you faced Jim Richardson's rule of justice, represented by a double-barreled shotgun. And at the end of the road, there was only one way out.The House at the End of the Road: The Story of Three Generations of an Interracial Family in the American South examines how one pioneering interracial couple developed a love and a racial identity that carried them defiantly through the Jim Crow years. Through interviews and oral history collected from both sides of the Richardson family's racial divide, as well as archival research, The House at the End of the Road probes into the core of the issue of race in early twentieth-century America. At the same time, it takes the lessons of the past and places them under the scrutiny of a contemporary world adjusted to DNA ancestry testing, a more flexible sense of racial and ethnic identity, and a tolerance and acceptance of the racial ambiguity that laws prohibiting Jim and Edna Richardson's marriage sought to eliminate.Jim and Edna Richardson were Ralph Eubanks's grandparents. Now, decades after interracial marriage became legal, Eubanks takes readers on a journey back to his grandparents' house at the end of the road where he reconstructs their life and times and seeks lessons for America's multiracial future.
Vinegar and Char by
Yes, there is barbecue, but that's just one course of the meal. With Vinegar and Char the Southern Foodways Alliance celebrates twenty years of symposia by offering a collection of poems that are by turns as sophisticated and complex, as vivid and funny, and as buoyant and poignant as any SFA gathering. The roster of contributors includes Natasha Trethewey, Robert Morgan, Atsuro Riley, Adrienne Su, Richard Blanco, Ed Madden, Nikky Finney, Frank X Walker, Sheryl St. Germain, Molly McCully Brown, and forty-five more. These poets represent past, current, and future conversations about what it means to be southern. Throughout the anthology, region is layered with race, class, sexuality, and other shaping identities. With an introduction by Sandra Beasley, a thought-provoking foreword by W. Ralph Eubanks, and luminous original artwork by Julie Sola, this collection is an ideal gift. Meant to be savored slowly or devoured at once, these pages are a perfect way to spend the hour before supper, with a glass of iced tea-or the hour after, with a pour of bourbon-and a fitting celebration of the SFA's focus and community.