Registration now closed

Author Talk | Old Enough

Attend a lively discussion with the editor and two contributors of "Old Enough: Southern Women Artists and Writers on Creativity and Aging."

A discussion about women artists and writers on self-perception and self-imposed expectations on aging, creativity, and power.

In Old Enough, twenty-one women artists and writers write about the experience of aging. Gay, straight, unmarried, partnered, widowed, Black, white, Latinx, retired, and working, these women are not squeamish about the challenges of growing older, including ageism, health concerns, and loss. And they are frank about how received notions of female aging can be restrictive and diminishing. But in lyrical, sometimes wry, often inspiring essays they explore what growing older can offer: self-knowledge, insight, and acceptance. Striking portraits by award-winning photographer Carolyn Sherer, who is also a contributor to the volume, accompany each essay.

At the heart of this collection is the bold championing of creative practice. Some contributors look back to their girlhood to recall their first powerful connections to art, while others show how they have refreshed their commitment to maintaining a practice. However, all are still driven to create and to investigate, to stay committed to the processes that work while finding new ways to stay creatively alive. Old Enough aims to honor the limitless variety, depth, and scope of being “old enough” and will resonate with readers who want to understand and find purpose, meaning, and comradery in their creative journey.

Books will be available for sale and signing from Bookmiser. 

Registration is recommended.

Jay Lamar is co-editor with Jeanie Thompson of The Remembered Gate: Memoirs by Alabama Writers (2003). Her essay “Secrets” was included in a special edition of Southern Humanities Review, and she is a contributor to Albert Murray and the Aesthetic Imagination of a Nation (2010), one of several titles in the Pebble Hill Imprint series she established while serving as director of Auburn University’s Center for the Arts and Humanities. Lamar has written and edited for scholarly, professional, and public-interest publications for almost thirty years. She was founding director of the Alabama Book Festival and first director of the Alabama Center for the Book. She served as executive director of the Alabama Bicentennial Commission, 2014–2020. 

Jacqueline Allen Trimble is a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellow, a Cave Canem Fellow, and an Alabama State Council on the Arts Literary Fellow. American Happiness, her debut poetry collection, won the Balcones Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in various anthologies and journals including Poetry Magazine, The Offing, The Louisville Review, The Rumpus, and Poet Lore. She is a professor of English and chairs the Department of Languages and Literatures at Alabama State University.

Jeanie Thompson is the author of The Seasons Bear Us, White for Harvest: New and Selected Poems, Witness, Litany for a Vanishing Landscape, How to Enter the River, and Lotus and Psalm. Her poems have been published in Whatever Remembers Us, High Horse, Working the Dirt, and The Best of Crazyhorse, among others. She teaches at Spalding University’s brief-residency MFA in Writing program and is the founding executive director of the Alabama Writers’ Forum, a statewide literary arts service organization. She was also the founding executive Director of Black Warrior Review literary journal. Jeanie’s awards include two literary fellowships from the Alabama State Council on the Arts and a fellowship from the Louisiana Arts and Humanities Council. 

* Presented by Adult Services. 

Upcoming events