Acclaimed feminist author Dorothy Allison will present a free, public lecture entitled “A Racecar Named Desire: The Intersection of Class, Race, Sexuality and Gender” on Tuesday, April 17 at 7 p.m. in The Forum, Elaine Langone Center. The event is sponsored by the Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity and Gender.
The talk will examine the stories we love or hate or need to believe can tell us a great deal about the way the world works, and how they might be changed.
Allison has felt herself an expatriate since she was 13 and her family sneaked out of Greenville, S.C., dragging a U-Haul trailer and all their worldly possessions. Through half a dozen books and shifts from Greenville to Florida to Washington D.C. to New York and finally Northern California, she has clung to the country of her imagination — a landscape peopled by stubborn-faced women who take whatever work they can find, desperate adolescent girls prone to lying as an act of defiance, and men whose craggy features hide more wounded gentleness than is safe to acknowledge. These days she is completing a novel and sorting out how to keep her southern accent in a western locale — something that has proved not so difficult as she first imagined.