OLLI Reads   

Few women of the American Revolutionary period have come through 250 years of United States history with such clarity and color as Angelica Schuyler Church. For Hamilton fans, yes, that Angelica. She was Alexander Hamilton's "saucy" sister-in law, and the heart of Thomas Jefferson's "charming coterie" of artists and salonnières, and she was also in the red hot center of American history at its birth: in Boston; in Newport; in Yorktown; in Paris and London, helping to determine the standing of the new nation on the world stage. In this enthralling and revealing woman's-eye view of a revolutionary era, Molly Beer breathes vibrant new life into a period usually dominated by masculine themes and often dulled by familiarity. In telling Angelica's story, she illuminates how American women have always plied influence and networks for political ends, including the making of a new nation.

Molly Beer is an essayist and documentary nonfiction writer and a lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Michigan. She received her BA in English from Duke University; her MA in English from the Bread Loaf School of English, Middlebury College; and her MFA in Creative Nonfiction Writing, University of New Mexico.

James Baldwin was a pivotal figure of the twentieth century, an influential author, intellectual, and activist who led a celebrated public life— and whose words, image, and persona remain current in our culture today. Yet it is the private, vulnerable, and messier Baldwin—the man behind that image —who is the focus of this book. Magdalena J. Zaborowska draws on Baldwin’s archives and material legacy— from his unpublished papers to his books to his house in France—to offer a fresh look at the writer’s understated and obscured private life. She offers a fresh understanding of his life and works as seen through his close relationships and complicated private life.

Professor Zaborowska is professor and chair of the Department of American Culture and professor in the Department of Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan. She received her undergraduate degree from Warsaw University, Poland and her Ph.D., University of Oregon. She has taught and been a Distinguished Visiting Professor at several universities in the United States and abroad. She has several published works on James Baldwin including Me and My House: James Baldwin’s Last Decade in Paris and James Baldwin’s Turkish Decade: Erotics of Style. Her work can also be seen in an online exhibit devoted to Baldwin’s house in France at the National Museum of African American History and Culture / Smithsonian in Washington DC.