Pulitzer Prize winning author to speak April 9 in Idaho Falls

Diane McWhorter

Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Diane McWhorter, author of Carry  Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama, the Climatic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution, will be the speaker at the Idaho Humanities Council's 8th Annual Eastern Idaho Distinguished Humanities Lecture and Dinner on Thursday, April 9, 7 p.m., at the Shilo Inn in Idaho Falls.

Tickets are available for purchase by clicking here or by calling the IHC toll free at 888-345-5346.

General tickets are $45. Benefactor tickets are $75 and include an invitation to a pre-dinner reception with McWhorter in a private home and preferred seating at the dinner and lecture.

At the Shilo, the evening will begin with a no-host reception at 6 p.m. Dinner will be served at 7 p.m. with McWhorter's talk to follow. Copies of Carry Me Home will be available onsite from Barnes and Noble, and McWhorter will be available for signing afterwards.

The event is being supported by the William J. and Shirley A. Maeck Family Foundation, Teton Toyota and Volkswagen, Bank of Idaho, Idaho Public Television, INL, Barnes and Noble, Melaleuca, Steve and Cindy Carr, the Carr Family Foundation and KISU Radio.

A native of Birmingham, McWhorter started Carry Me Home as an effort to understand her own family's involvement in the cataclysmic events of 1963. "McWhorter pursued her search as both daughter and citizen, making her family a metaphor for her country," says the writeup in the New York Times Book Review of March 18, 2001. "Each encounters its own wrongdoing and lives with suspicions about itself, but her family's revelations inspire more relief than what she learns about her country."

Currently a professor at Harvard University, McWhorter is an American journalist and commentator who has written extensively about race and the history of civil rights in America. She is a longtime contributor to the New York Times and has written for the op-ed page of USA Today, Slate, and many other publications. Carry Me Home was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction and the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize in 2002. It also won the Southern Book Critics Circle Award, is one of Time Magazine's All-Time 100 Non-fiction Books since 1923, and made the "Best Books List" in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Newsday, Chicago Tribune, Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, and American Heritage.

Here is a program from 2013 in which McWhorter talks about her experience researching and writing about civil rights in her native state.