Award-winning writer Walter Mosley, best known for his mysteries featuring private investigator Easy Rawlins, will speak at Scripps College on April 4 and 5.
Mosley’s appearances are the highlight of a two-day celebration of the 20th anniversary of the Scripps Humanities Institute and part of its spring 2007 program, “L.A. Palimpsest.”
Mosley’s first talk will be “Recovering Los Angeles’ Hidden Stories and Forgotten Communities,” on Wednesday, April 4, at 7:30 p.m. in Garrison Theater, Scripps College Performing Arts Center. The following day, at 12 noon, he will speak on “This Year You Write Your Novel,” in the Hampton Room of the Malott Commons. Both talks are free and open to the public.
Devil in a Blue Dress, Mosley’s first Rawlins novel, was adapted into a film starring Denzel Washington. Mosley is also the author of the best-selling Bad Boy Brawly Brown, Black Betty, and Little Scarlet, among others.
His essays often examine ways in which the African-American perspective can contribute to political, economic, and social progress in America. One of his short stories earned the O’Henry Award. In 2004, he was given the PEN USA Lifetime Achievement Award and the Sundance Risk Taker Award.
The first African American to serve on the National Book Foundation’s board of directors, Mosley is the founder of the publishing program at the City College of New York. He also serves on the boards of The Poetry Society of America and TransAfrica.
Nathalie Rachlin, director of the Scripps College Humanities Institute, and Susan Rankaitis, Fletcher Jones Professor in Studio Art, are organizing the two-day events. This semester’s full program, “L.A. Palimpsest,” uncovers aspects of Los Angeles’ social, economic, ethnic, and artistic history that have been obstructed due to the city’s ability to continually reinvent itself. The Humanities Institute hopes to refute the clichés that Los Angeles is a rootless, polarized, and fragmented city by bringing to Scripps writers, urban and social historians, artists, journalists, and musicians, to discuss their work uncovering the lost past of Los Angeles.
For more information, call the Humanities Institute at (909) 621-8326.