APSU Asanbe Diversity Symposium keynote lecture speaker to be poet, artist & diversity officer Colón

Clarksville, TN – During the 2016 Presidential Election, CNN sent reporters to Welch, West Virginia, for a piece on “why America’s white working class feels left behind.” The story painted Appalachia as a homogenous region, populated only by poor, white coal miners and farmers.

But when Puerto Rican poet Ricardo Nazario y Colón traveled through the area’s wooded, rural hills, he noticed something different.

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Award-winning novelist/essayist David Bradley to speak at APSU Asanbe Diversity Symposium

Austin Peay State University (APSU)

Clarksville, TN – The last time David Bradley, a PEN/Faulkner Award-winning novelist, visited Austin Peay State University (APSU), during the 2000-01 academic year, he helped initiate important conversations across campus through his class, “Civil Rights and Literature,” and his public lecture, “The Function of Lynching in Contemporary America: To Make Them Stand in Fear.”

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Noted transgender scholar and poet to speak at APSU’s Asanbe Diversity Symposium

Clarksville, TN – In 2006, Jay Ladin, a married father with three children, left Yeshiva University, where he worked as the Gottesman professor of English. Fifteen months later, Ladin returned as Joy, the first openly transgender employee at an Orthodox Jewish institution.

Ladin had struggled with her male identity throughout her life—attempting suicide twice by the time she was 10—but as a young boy, she found comfort in her Jewish faith. In a 2013 interview with the Peabody Award-winning podcast “On Being,” she said she experienced a powerful connection with the Torah’s one genderless character—God.

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