Creative Campus

During February 4-5, 2009, the Creative Campus Initiative, in partnership with University Libraries, Crossroads Community Center, New College, the African American Studies Program, and the English Department’s Bankhead Visiting Writers Series, hosted African American scholar and author Dr. Jerry W. Ward Jr. on the University of Alabama’s campus. Dr. Ward read from his memoir The Katrina Papers: A Journal of Trauma and Recovery and recounted personal experiences of Hurricane Katrina to a captivated group of individuals in Gorgas Library. He also participated in a Community Conversation in Morgan Hall with Brice Miller, assistant director of the Crossroads Community Center and former resident of New Orleans. The Community Conversation was an opportunity for individuals to share personal experiences from Hurricane Katrina as well as engage in reflective conversation with Dr. Ward and Mr. Miller. Dr. Ward’s visit helped shine light on and bring acceptance of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath to many students, faculty, and community members in attendance.

When asked about Dr. Ward’s memoir, Creative Campus Executive Director Dr. Hank Lazer stated:

“The Katrina Papers is not your average memoir. It is a fusion of many kinds of writing, including intellectual autobiography, personal narrative, political/cultural analysis, spiritual journal, literary history, and poetry. Though it is the record of one man’s experience of Hurricane Katrina, it is a record that is fully a part of his life and work as a scholar, political activist, and professor. The Katrina Papers provides space not only for the traumatic events but also for ruminations on authors such as Richard Wright and theorists like Deleuze and Guattari. The result is a complex though thoroughly accessible book. The struggle with form— the search for a medium proper to the complex social, personal, and political ramifications of an event unprecedented in this scholar’s life and in American social history— lies at the very heart of The Katrina Papers. The book depicts an enigmatic and multi-stranded world view which takes the local as its nexus for understanding the global. It resists the temptation to simplify or clarify when simplification and clarification are not possible. Ward’s narrative is, at times, very direct, but he always refuses to simplify the complex emotional and spiritual volatility of the process and the historical moment that he is witnessing. The end result is an honesty that is both pedagogical and inspiring.”

Dr. Jerry W. Ward, Jr. is a distinguished professor of English and African American World Studies at Dillard University, New Orleans, LA. Ward spent 32 years as the Lawrence Durgin Professor of Literature at Tougaloo College in Jackson. He is recognized as one of the leading experts on Richard Wright. His credentials concerning Wright include, co-editor of the Richard Wright Encyclopedia, published in 2006 by Greenwood Press; founding member of the Richard Wright Circle, and his portrayal of Richard Wright in the Mississippi Humanities Council's Mississippi Chautauqua Writers series. Ward received a Bachelor of Science degree from Tougaloo College, a Master of Science degree from the Illinois Institute of Technology, and a Ph.D. at the University of Virginia. Some of his works are Black Southern Voices, Redefining American Literary History, and Trouble the Water: 250 Years of African American Poetry, and THE KATRINA PAPERS: A Journal of Trauma and Recovery.

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