This year marks the 80th anniversary of Smith’s debut novel “Strange Fruit,” the 75th anniversary of “Killers of the Dream,” and the 70th anniversary of “The Journey.” The Lillian E. Smith Center is scheduling various events over the course of 2024 to commemorate these anniversaries.
“Celebrating Lillian E. Smith” is the first celebration this year of Smith’s legacy and work.
The community is invited to events on Mar. 19 at 7:00 PM at the Georgia Center for the Book in Decatur and on Mar. 20 at 3:30 PM at the Mason-Scharfenstein Museum of Art at Piedmont University in Demorest.
“Lillian Smith’s work echoes through the decades and remains relevant today,” said Dr. Matthew Teutsch, Director of the Lillian E. Smith Center. “These celebrations will be an opportunity to introduce Smith to new audiences and to revisit her prescient observations about the human condition.”
Presenters include Rev. Dr. Benjamin Boswell, pastor at Myers Park Baptist Church in Charlotte, Dr. Keri Leigh Merritt, historian and author of an upcoming biography on Smith, and Dr. Jennifer Morrison, Assistant Professor of English at Xavier University in Louisiana.
On writing her 1949 memoir “Killers of the Dream,” Lillian Smith said, “I wrote it because I had to find out what life in a segregated culture had done to me, one person. I had to put down on paper these experiences so that I could see their meaning for me. I was in dialogue with myself as I wrote, as well as with my hometown and my childhood and history and the future, and the past. Writing is both horizontal and vertical exploration.”
