�޻���ֱ��

Author T. Geronimo Johnson will speak at the Ernest J. Gaines Center on UL Lafayette’s campus Tuesday.

Johnson received the 2015 Ernest Gaines Award for Literary Excellence for his latest novel, “Welcome to Braggsville,” in which four University of California, Berkeley, students stage a dramatic protest during a Civil War reenactment.

“Organic, plucky, smart, ‘Welcome to Braggsville’ is the funniest sendup of identity politics, the academy and white racial anxiety to hit the scene in years,” wrote Rich Benjamin in The New York Times Sunday Book Review. It was longlisted for the 2015 National Book Award and named one of the best books of 2015 by The Washington Post, Time magazine, the Chicago Tribune, NPR, and The Huffington Post, among others.

Johnson’s first novel, “Hold It ‘Til It Hurts,” was a finalist for the 2013 PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction.

The Ernest J. Gaines Center is in Edith Garland Dupré Library at the University of �޻���ֱ�� at Lafayette. The event is free and open to the public. It begins at 7 p.m.

For more information, contact Cheylon Woods, archivist and head of the Ernest J. Gaines Center, at cheylon.woods@louisiana.edu or at (337) 482-1848.

The Center is an international center for scholarship, programming, and community outreach on Gaines, UL Lafayette writer-in-residence emeritus, and his work. He is best known for his novels “The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman” and “A Lesson Before Dying.”

Photo by Elizabeth R. Cowan