Author and storyteller Carolyn Finney will be the featured speaker at the 2024 Wilma Dykeman Stokely Memorial Lecture, sponsored by the John C. Hodges Society of UT Libraries and Friends of the Knox County Public Library. Finney returned to school after a 15-year absence to complete a B.A., M.A. (both of these degrees focused on gender and environmental issues in Kenya and Nepal, respectively) and Ph.D. (which focused on African Americans and environmental issues in the U.S.). She has been a Fulbright Scholar and a Canon National Parks Science Scholar, and she earned a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in Environmental Studies. In her 2014 book Black Faces, White Spaces, Finney argues that the legacies of slavery, Jim Crow and racial violence have shaped cultural understandings of the “great outdoors” and determined who should and can have access to natural spaces. Admission is free. Register HERE.