Hold the date! Schomburg panel on Lorraine Hansberry: Thursday, March 22, 2018

In September 2017, the first-ever feature documentary, Lorraine Hansberry: Sighted Eyes/Feeling Heart, screened at the Toronto Film Festival; in January 2018, the film makes its television debut as part of the American Masters PBS series. Throughout 2018, the film will be joined by a number of new print biographies.

Biographical projects about Lorraine Hansberry are forthcoming from Margaret Wilkerson (author of several biographical essays on Lorraine Hansberry and Professor Emerita of African Diaspora Studies and Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies at the University of California, Berkeley); Imani Perry (author of the forthcoming Looking for Lorraine: A Life of Lorraine Hansberry and a professor of African American Studies at Princeton University); and Soyica Colbert (author of the forthcoming Lorraine Hansberry: Artist/Activist and professor of African American Studies and Theater & Performance Studies at Georgetown University).

On Thursday, March 22, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture of the New York Public Library, co-presented with the Lorraine Hansberry Literary Trust, will host a panel, "Lorraine Hansberry: Reimagining Biography," with Wilkerson, Perry, Colbert, and Lorraine Hansberry: Sighted Eyes/Feeling Heart director Tracy Heather Strain. The panelists will discuss the complicated and challenging decision-making that goes into developing a biography and, specifically, telling the complex story of Lorraine Hansberry. Joi Gresham, the executive director of the Lorraine Hansberry Literary Trust, will introduce the panel with background information on Hansberry biographies to date.