February 9, 2004

Contact: Kimberly Stark, (901) 333-4023 -- Marilyn Duncan, (901) 333-4247

SOUTHWEST BROWN BAG LUNCHEON SERIES CONTINUES WITH PRESENTATION ON WRIGHT

The Honors Program Brown Bag Luncheon series at Southwest Tennessee Community College continues in its third semester this month with a presentation on author Richard Wright.

Once again, the series will feature Southwest faculty, along with a local businesswoman, who will make presentations in their areas of specialization or interest. The Brown Bag Luncheon series is designed to promote interest in and awareness of the Honors Program at Southwest and is open to the entire college community and the public. All presentations are scheduled for noon in the Fulton Building, Room 112, on the College's Macon Cove Campus. They will last about an hour.

On Monday, February 23, Dr. Yvonne Robinson Jones, associate professor of English, will open this semester’s offerings with a look at the life and works of Wright, an African-American author who is the subject of Jones’s doctoral dissertation. Jones teaches African-American literature and completed her Ph.D. in English at the University of Mississippi this academic year with an emphasis in twentieth-century American and African- American literature and gender studies with a dissertation titled “Decapitated and Smashed Heads: A Gender-Based Study of Richard Wright’s Major Fiction.”

Dr. Jones and her husband, Eddie Jones, a photographer and instructor of Graphic Arts at the College, were instrumental in creating a freestanding exhibit on Wright, ‘Richard Wright and the Mid-South,’ which is on view in the Parrish Library on the College's Union Avenue Campus. Jones is especially proud to be an advisory member of The Richard Wright Circle that publishes the Richard Wright Newsletter at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia.

For more information about the Brown Bag Series, call Thad Cockrill at (901) 333-4604.