The Big Read Celebrates Their Eyes Were Watching God

"Janie saw her life like a great tree in leaf with the things suffered, things
enjoyed, things done and undone. Dawn and doom were in the branches."

February is Black History Month. It is also the month of an annual event called the African American Read In, a National Council of Teachers of English-sponsored festival promoting literacy, heritage and imagination. For years, the Decatur campus LTC has rallied campus participation in this event, and this year is no different.

Overlapping the African American Read-In is another major literary event called The Big Read, a National Endowment for the Arts initiative "designed to restore reading to the center of American culture [and] encourage reading for pleasure and enlightenment. " How it works is that a title is selected and everyone within a particular community agrees to read and discuss it.

This year's pick for Atlanta is Zora Neale Hurston's classic love story, Their Eyes Were Watching God.

The Atlanta History Center will be hosting its Big Read kick off on February 17 with a free Harlem Renaissance themed party, complete with music and a photographic exhibition titled Let Your Motto Be Resistance. AHC has also planned a host of festivities stretching throughout February and March.

Stay tuned as our Learning and Tutoring Center announces its own line up of events celebrating the African American Read In and Atlanta's Big Read.

Of course, be sure to check out Their Eyes from the campus or local library, buy it from a bookstore or order a copy online, and celebrate Black History Month by letting books like this one lift your imagination to greater heights!

Dr. Ben Carson and the Power of Reading

Physician, professor, author, motivational speaker and humanitarian Dr. Benjamin Solomon Carson is a super star in the world of medicine. Holding degrees from Yale and the University of Michigan, he has headed the department of Pediatric Neurosurgery at the prestigious Johns Hopkins University Hospital since he was thirty-three years old. At the peak of his career Carson would perform more than five hundred surgeries a year-- far more than most brain surgeons take on. People travel great distances in the hope that he will be able to help their cases, ones which have often been written off as impossible. Families from the United States, Africa, Europe and the Middle East trust their children to him because of his development of innovative surgical techniques, including one that helped him become the first surgeon to successfully separate twins joined at the head.

With a resume like this, it would be easy to assume that Carson was groomed by educated parents or is following in the footsteps of a grandparent similar in stature to Daniel Hale Williams, Charles Drew or William Augustus

Hinton. Not so.

Journey with us on Thursday, January 28 as we retrace some of the steps in Dr. Carson’s inspirational odyssey through poverty, uncertainty and anger to personal victory during our screening of Gifted Hands: The Ben Carson Story. This recently-made dramatization of highlights of Carson’s life centers largely on the power that reading has to transform a life and stars Cuba Gooding, Jr. (Boyz N the Hood and Jerry McGuire) as Carson and Kimberly Elise (Great

Debaters and Beloved) as Carson’s determined mother,

Sonya.

As a segue to the film, Professor Shawn L. Williams will read highlights from "The Power of Reading" chapter in Carson’s motivational memoir, Think Big.

The program will start at 11 a.m. and run until 1 p.m.

Welcome

We’re looking forward to exploring ways to use the blogosphere to dynamically link our students’ voices with instructor curricula and the academic support that we offer in the LTC. There are so many exciting possibilities!

Please stay tuned as we gear up to bring you news about our programming line-up. In the meantime, we invite you to spend some time browsing our links (which will continue to expand along with the growth of this site).

We can’t wait to hear what you have to say.