Homes of Dead Writers with Professor Chakkalakal

Tess Chakkalakal, Professor of Africana Studies and English at Bowdoin College will present a program about the homes of Sarah Orne Jewett, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Nathaniel Hawthorne on Thursday, October 17, 2024, at Norway Memorial Library.

Professor Chakkalakal will talk about these authors, the history of their homes, and how these homes and areas of Maine inspired them. She is used to taking listeners inside these American authors’ houses and several others as she is the cohost of a podcast, Dead Writers, with novelist and professor Brock Clarke. Tess has a passion for preservation as she worked to restore the historic exterior of the Harriet Beecher Stowe house in Brunswick, Maine.

She has published widely on nineteenth-century African American and American literature. She is the author of the Novel Bondage: Slavery, Marriage, and Freedom in Nineteenth-Century America, which won the Robert K. Martin Prize for best book in American literature. She is co-editor of Jim Crow, Literature, and the Legacy of Sutton E. Griggs and Imperium in Imperio by Sutton E. Griggs: A Critical Edition. She releases a new book in February 2025, A Matter of Complexion: The Life and Fictions of Charles W. Chesnutt.

The first season of Professor Chakkalakal’s podcast series Dead Writers is available from Maine Public Radio and other podcast platforms. She serves on the Board of Directors of Chop Point School and The Maine Maritime Museum.

The Norway Museum and Historical Society and the Friends of Norway Memorial Library are cosponsors of this program. It is free and open to the public. Norway Memorial Library is located at 258 Main Street, Norway, Maine. For more information, call 207-743-5309 or visit www.norwaymemoriallibrary.org.