History, literature, and the writing process all come to life at the Books Along the Teche Literary Festival’s 2022 programming including authors talks, panel discussions and presentations.
On Friday, Dr. Phebe Hayes will discuss Reconstruction and Post Civil War in New Iberia, bringing to life the African American experience. Hayes, a retired professor of Communication Sciences and Disorders at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, and the former dean of its College of General Studies, is the descendant of West African ancestors who were enslaved on local plantations. Following her retirement, she began researching the history of African Americans of Iberia Parish from the pre-colonial Louisiana period to the end of the Jim Crow era, and founded the Iberia Parish African American Historical Society. The presentation will be held at 9 am at the Sliman Theater.
Immediately following, a tribute to Ernest Gaines will be presented by the Ernest J. Gaines Center at UL Lafayette, an international center for scholarship on the noted author and his work. Born in 1933 on a plantation in Pointe Coupee Parish, Gaines wrote award-winning novels based on the Black experience in the rural South. His works include The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, A Gathering of Old Men and A Lesson Before Dying. A panel of experts will discuss the impact of the late writer on the literary world, and how his work and mission continues through his center today.
On Friday afternoon, a panel discussion will take place on The Year of Yellow Jack, a novel of historical fiction written by retired judge Anne L. Simon about the real-life outbreak of yellow fever in New Iberia in 1839, and the young Black woman, Felicite, who nursed and saved the lives of many people.
James Lee Burke fans will relish the opportunity to attend the James Lee Burke symposium. UL Lafayette scholars will examine Burke’s works and discuss what can be revealed from a close character study of his beloved protagonist, New Iberia detective Dave Robicheaux.
If you enjoy seeing books you love come to life, don’t miss the Readers Theater, in which actors from the Iberia Performing Arts League will dramatize selected passages from two different novels. On Friday, they will perform onstage dialogue from Gaines’ classic 1983 work about a murder on a Louisiana plantation, A Gathering of Old Men. On Sunday, watch actors narrate high points from Burke’s The Neon Rain, the first installment in his iconic Dave Robicheaux series.
Sponsored by Iberia Travel
