Taylor Branch, Pulitzer Prize Winning Author and Prof. Quintard Taylor, Jan. 28-30, 2011
Taylor Branch
Professor Quintard Taylor, University of Washington, Seattle
Blackpast.org Fact Sheet (.pdf, 90.7KB)
Join us in Cannon Beach, Oregon for the Cannon Beach Arts Symposium Featuring Pulitzer Prize Winning Author, Historian and Musician
TAYLOR BRANCH
“Myths and Miracles of America in the
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Years” Saturday evening, January 29, 2011 at 7pm at the Coaster Theatre
(Author of Parting the Waters; Pillar of Fire;
At Canaan’s Edge) www.taylorbranch.com
Book Signing with TAYLOR BRANCH also
and University of Washington History Dept., Seattle, www.blackpast.org
Professor Quintard Taylor Jr.
“Civil Rights in the Northwest” Friday evening, January 28, 2011 at 7pm followed by a book signing at the Coaster Theatre in Cannon Beach
All addresses by our speakers and panels and musicians will be at the Coaster Theatre
• Session I on the Commemoration of the 50th Anniversary of the Freedom Rides
• Session II on Civil Rights and Nonviolence
• Presentations by musicians, artists, civil rights advocates, journalists, freedom riders & historians
• Roundtables with volunteers, students and renowned thinkers in conversation
• Walks by the third biggest monolith in the World: Haystack Rock and its tide pool ecosystems
• Ecola and Oswald West State Parks’ Old Growth Forests of Hemlock, Fir and Cedar Stands
• Crab, Tuna and Salmon season
• Regular Twitter updates
5X8 postcard of Haystack Rock
With stamp: Cannon Beach Arts
Symposium: Taylor Branch
(in left hand bottom corner of front side)
And same stamp on right hand corner of back side of postcard
Printed underneath stamp: Cannon Beach Arts Association
Symposium Featuring Taylor Branch
P.O. Box 684
Cannon Beach, Oregon 97110
Contact: Carol Knutson at (503)338-2501 or
Email: cknutson@clatsopcc.edu
Web Page: http://www.clatsopcc.edu/literature
Inspiration Point, Cannon Beach, Oregon
Inside postcard:
Online registration for the Cannon Beach Arts
Symposium Featuring Taylor Branch begins
November 30, 2010
http://www.clatsopcc.edu/literature
Visit cannonbeacharts@gmail.org /cknutson@clatsopcc.edu
In an effort to conserve resources, you will receive an email confirmation
when your $120.00 check, made out to the Cannon Beach Arts Association/
Taylor Branch Symposium is received. Registrations packets will be available
at the Cannon Beach Chamber of Commerce from 2pm to 4pm on Friday,
January 28, 2011. Our local lodging establishments offer discounted room
rates and packages for our Cannon Beach Arts Symposium participants.
A complete list is available on our website and each lodging establishment
will handle symposium reservations separately. When booking your room,
please be sure to indicate that you will be attending the Symposium.
A PDF of all Symposium registration materials will be available online
in November for those who prefer to register by mail.
Your $120.00 Symposium registration fee includes round-trip travel by tour bus,
in Commemoration of the 50th Anniversary of the Summer of the Freedom Rides,
departing from Portland, Oregon’s Union Station at noon on Friday, January 28, 2011
and arriving at the Cannon Beach Chamber of Commerce for a clam chowder and chili feed from 2pm- 4pm. Travel from the Chamber to your individual lodging establishment by pre-arranged shuttles. Registration also includes tickets to all symposium roundtables, panels, sessions and keynote addresses and book signings by Pulitzer Prize Winning Author Taylor Branch and University of Washington Professor Quintard Taylor Jr. at the Coaster Theatre; two champagne and dessert receptions; and two continental breakfasts. For a complete schedule of events, check out our Cannon Beach Arts Symposium, Featuring Pulitzer Prize Winning Author Taylor Branch website at cknutson@clatsopcc.edu
or cannonbeacharts@org Follow us on Twitter at www.cannonbeacharts.org/taylorbranchsymposium
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Taylor Branch is an American author and public speaker best known for his landmark narrative history of the civil rights era, America in the King Years. The trilogy’s first book, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-63, won the Pulitzer Prize and numerous other awards in 1989. Two successive volumes also gained critical and popular success: Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years, 1963-65, and At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-1968. Decades later, all three books remain in demand. Some reviewers have compared the King-era trilogy, which required more than twenty-four years of intensive research, with epic histories such as Shelby Foote’s The Civil War and Robert Caro’s multi-volume biography of Lyndon Johnson.
In 2009, Simon and Schuster published The Clinton Tapes: Wrestling History with the President. Far more personal than Branch’s previous books, this memoir tells of an unprecedented eight-year project to gather a sitting president’s comprehensive oral history on tape. The collaboration is a story in itself, born of mutual concern over the declining quality of raw material for presidential history. At the initiative of President Bill Clinton, Branch suspended work on the King books about once a month to meet secretly in the White House residence, nearly always late at night. There he prompted Clinton to record candid observations for posterity. The book reveals a president up close and unguarded, perceived by an author struggling to balance many roles.
Aside from writing, Taylor Branch speaks before a variety of audiences—colleges, high schools, churches, synagogues, mosques, political and professional groups. He has discussed doctrines of nonviolence with prisoners at San Quentin as well as officers at the National War College. He has presented seminars on civil rights at Oxford University and in sixth-grade classrooms. His 2008 speech at the National Cathedral commemorated the anniversary of Dr. King’s last Sunday sermon from that pulpit. In 2009, he gave the Theodore H. White Lecture on the Press and Politics at Harvard.
His musical sidelights have spanned the Atlanta Boy Choir in the 1950s, a high-school folk trio, and a contemporary octet for spirituals. In 2006, he and two friends reconstituted their 1960s college band as the cover group Off Our Rocker, which has recorded and released two CDs in playful tribute to the Beatles.
Sample of book reviews, lectures, media appearances, public commentary, and musical tracks are available on the website, www.taylorbranch.com.
Branch began his career in 1970 as a staff journalist for The Washington Monthly, Harper’s, and Esquire. He holds honorary doctoral degrees from seven colleges and universities. Other citations include the Dayton Literary Peace Prize Lifetime Achievement Award in 2008 and the National Humanities Medal in 1999.
Books: The Clinton Tapes: Wrestling History with the President (2009)
At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-68 (Simon & Schuster, 2006)
Winner: Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize for Non-Fiction, 2006
Winner: Robert F. Kennedy Book Award, 2007
Winner: Search For Common Ground Book Award, 2007
Finalist: National Book Award, History, 2006
Finalist: National Book Critics Circle Award, Biography, 2006
Finalist: J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize, 2007
Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years, 1963-65 (1998)
Winner: American Bar Association Silver Gavel Award, 1999
Winner: Sidney Hillman Book Award, 1999
Winner: Imus Book Award
Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-63 (1988)
Winner: Pulitzer Prize for History, 1988
Winner: National Book Critics Circle Award, 1988
Winner: Los Angeles Times Book Award, 1988
Winner: Melcher Book Award, 1988
Winner: English-Speaking Union Book Award, 1989
Winner: Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, 1989
Finalist: National Book Award, Non-Fiction, 1989
Labyrinth (With Eugene M. Propper) (Viking: 1982)
The Empire Blues (fiction) (Simon & Schuster: 1981)
Second Wind (With Bill Russell) (Random House: 1979)
Blind Ambition (ghostwriter for John Dean) (Simon & Schuster: 1976)
Blowing the Whistle: Dissent in the Public Interest (With Charles Peters) (Praeger: 1972)
Honors: John S. Guggenheim Fellowship, 1983
John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship, 1991
U.S. National Humanities Medal, 1999
Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards, Lifetime Achievement, 2007
Dayton Literary Peace Prize, Lifetime Achievement, 2008
Education: A.B., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1968
M.P.A., Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University, 1970
Lecturer in Politics and History, Goucher College, 1998-2000
Background: Born January 14, 1947 in Atlanta, Georgia. Lives in Baltimore, Maryland with his wife Christina Macy. Their two children: Macy (b. 1980) and Franklin (b. 1983).\
Author bio: Quintard Taylor
(October 21, 2010)
QUINTARD TAYLOR, the Scott and Dorothy Bullitt Professor of American History at the University of Washington, is the author of The Forging of A Black Community: Seattle’s Central District from 1870 through the Civil Rights Era (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1994) and In Search of the Racial Frontier: African Americans in the America West, 1528-1990 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1998). He and Shirley Ann Wilson Moore are the editors of the anthology, African American Women Confront the West, 1600-2000 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2003) and he is co-editor with Lawrence B. de Graaf, and Kevin Mulroy of Seeking El Dorado: African Americans in California (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001). In 2008 he edited a two volume collection of primary documents titled From Timbuktu to Katrina: Readings in African American History (Boston: Thomson Wadsworth Press, 2008). The following year his book, America-I-Am Black Facts: The Story of a People Through Timelines, 1601-2000, was released by Tavis Smiley Books. The most recent book, Dr. Sam: Soldier, Educator, Advocate, Friend, An Autobiography which Taylor co-authored with the late university administrator and career army officer, was released last month.
Taylor is also the author of over fifty articles. His work on African American Western History, African American, African, Afro-Brazilian, and comparative ethnic history has appeared in the Western Historical Quarterly, Pacific Historical Review, Oregon Historical Quarterly, The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Journal of Negro History, Arizona and the West, Western Journal of Black Studies, Polish-American Studies, and the Journal of Ethnic Studies, among other jour¬nals. He is also editor of the Race and Culture Series for the University of Oklahoma Press.
In 2004, Taylor created an online website resource center for African American history now called BlackPast.org (www.blackpast.org). The center which houses over 4,000 pages of information, has links to over 600 other websites, and features contributions by more than 500 scholars from four continents. It is now one of the largest reference centers of its type on the Internet. So far in 2010 more than 2.5 million people from over 100 nations have visited the website.
In October Taylor begin a one year term as President of the Western History Association (WHA) and will preside over the organization during the celebration of its 50th anniversary. The WHA is the fourth largest association of historians in the United States.
Taylor is currently serving on the Board of Trustees of the Idaho Black History Museum in Boise and the HistoryLink Interactive History Project in Seattle. He also serves on the Advisory Board of the multi-year traveling exhibition organized by Radio and Television Personality Tavis Smiley titled “America-I-Am: The African American Imprint on America.” Taylor is a former member of the Washington State Historical Society and the Governing Council of the American Historical Association and a founding trustee of the Northwest African American Museum (NAAM). He was also a founding board member of the Central District Forum for Arts and Ideas. Taylor has taught at universities in Washington, Oregon, California, and Nigeria over his 40 year career in higher education.
For additional information please see the Quintard Taylor websites,
http://faculty.washington.edu/qtaylor/
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