Join us for the next installment of the Charlottesville Reading Series, featuring performance artist A.D. Carson and fiction writer Joanna Pearson. This event will be free and open to the public.
A.D. Carson is an award-winning performance artist and educator from Decatur, Illinois. He received his PhD from Clemson University doing work that focuses on race, literature, history, and rhetorical performances. A 2016 recipient of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Award for Excellence in Service at Clemson, Carson worked with students, staff, faculty, and community members to raise awareness of historic, entrenched racism at the university through his See the Stripes campaign, which takes its name from his 2014 poem. His dissertation, “Owning My Masters: The Rhetorics of Rhymes & Revolutions,” was recognized by the Graduate Student Government as the 2017 Outstanding Dissertation. Carson is currently assistant professor in Hip-Hop and the Global South at the University of Virginia. You can follow A.D. Carson on Twitter and Instagram at @aydeethegreat.
Joanna Pearson’s first collection of short stories, Every Human Love, was published in 2019 by Acre Books. Her fiction has appeared in Best of the Net, Best Small Fictions, Cincinnati Review, Colorado Review, Copper Nickel, Ecotone, Kenyon Review Online, and Mississippi Review, as well as other journals. She holds an MFA from the Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars and an MD from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and she now lives in North Carolina, where she works as a psychiatrist.