Pearl Cleage: Activism and Writing

Atlanta-based essayist, poet, journalist and novelist Pearl Cleage joins us for Cover to Cover this week. Cleage ventures into new territory as an artist and American in her latest novel Seen It All and Done the Rest. Cleage talks about how she’s been as much an activist in her life as an author. And the activist in her, fighting for civil rights as an African American in the 1960’s and 70’s and women’s rights after, dissociated herself from being American.

Cleage explores this idea with a new heroine, Josephine Evans, an actress of the international stage who returns stateside. Through Evans and the characters she encounters (some familiar— Abbie Browning’s back and Zora too), Cleage breathes life into current events and the issues of our age that read black and white in newspaper headlines. Josephine asks questions like "What is the free woman’s role in wartime," and with the full palette of human feelings, Cleage masterfully answers.

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Cracker Queen: A Memoir of a Jagged, Joyful Life

Raised in the deep south but she's no southern belle, Lauretta Hannon exposes the underbelly of growing up poor in a broken family in rural Georgia. Her literary debut Cracker Queen: A Memoir of a Jagged, Joyful Life is a knock-you-over-the-head testament to living graciously in the face of hardship. Join host Melissa Stiers and "Cracker Queen" Lauretta Hannon on Cover to Cover, Sunday night at 8 p.m. on your local GPB station.

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A New Found Mission

In the summer of 1993, an American traveled to Pakistan to climb the second highest mountain on earth, but he never reached the summit, he got lost coming down but found a new mission. The village Greg Mortenson stumbled into needed a school. After they helped him restore his health, he came back to the states with the determination to return one day and build them a school. He's been building schools throughout central Asia since. The New York Time's best-selling book Three Cups of Tea is an account of Greg Mortenson's mission. He sits down with GPB's Melissa Stiers to talk about the book that's on the required reading list at the Pentagon. Mortenson explains how his work is an affront to global terrorism. Why teaching not just a child... but a girl how to read quells the violence in Taliban-run regions of the world.

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