HAMMER Readings
Michael Ondaatje
Michael Ondaatje is the author of four novels, a memoir, a nonfiction book on film, and several books of poetry. won the Booker Prize; Anil’s Ghost won the Irish Times International Fiction Prize, the Giller Prize, and the Prix Medicis. His most recent novel is Divisidero. Born in Sri Lanka, he now lives in Toronto.

Hammer Lectures
Lani Guinier
Co-presented with the UCLA Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies as part of the Center's College Access Project for African Americans conference
Lani Guinier, Bennett Boskey Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, has been a key force in civil rights, working in the Civil Rights Division at the US Department of Justice, heading the voting rights project at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund in the 1980s, and serving in the Civil Rights Division during the Carter Administration. Since 2001, Guinier has been working on issues of fairness in higher education and is the author of the forthcoming book, Meritocracy, Inc. How Wealth Became Merit, Class Became Race and Higher Education Became a Gift From the Poor to the Rich.

HAMMER Readings
Janet Sarbanes & Marisa Silver
Janet Sarbanes is the author of the short story collection Army of One. She is currently completing a novel entitled This Land: The Adventures of the President's Daughter, and teaches creative writing and cultural studies at CalArts. Marisa Silver made her fiction debut in The New Yorker when she appeared in the inaugural “Debut Fiction” issue. Her collection of stories, Babe in Paradise, was a New York Times Notable Book and a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year. She is also the author of the novel No Direction Home.

Lunchtime Art Talks
Kara Walker's Gone, An Historical Romance of a Civil War as It Occurred Between the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart, 1994

Hammer Lectures
Darby English
Darby English is the author of How to See a Work of Art in Total Darkness and co-editor of Kara Walker: Narratives of a Negress. He is associate professor of art history at the University of Chicago, where he teaches modern and contemporary American art and cultural studies. He is also affiliated faculty in the Department of Visual Arts, as well as at the Center for Gender Studies and Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture.

HAMMER Readings
Frank Bidart
*Please note, this event has been CANCELLED - we apologize for any inconvenience*
Frank Bidart is the author of numerous books of poetry, including most recently Music Like Dirt, and is co-editor, with David Gewanter, of Robert Lowell’s Collected Poems. He has received the Academy’s Wallace Stevens Award, the Lila Wallace Reader’s Digest Foundation Writer’s Award, the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award given by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Shelley Award of the Poetry Society of America, and The Paris Review’s first Bernard F. Conners Prize for The War of Vaslav Nijinsky in 1981. He was elected a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets in 2003. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts and teaches at Wellesley College.

Book Club
Secret Daughter
by June Cross
Secret Daughter is the autobiography of a mixed race daughter and the mother who gave her away. June Cross was born during the birth of the Civil Rights Movement to an aspiring white actress and a well-known black comic from the forties duo Stump and Stumpy. She attended Harvard in the 1970s, the heyday of black radicalism, and is currently a successful journalist, author and activist. Discussion led by Tameka Norris, an undergraduate in the UCLA department of art, an ArtsBridge and ArtsIN scholar, and a student educator at the Hammer Museum.

Secret Daughter is available in the Hammer Bookstore.

Lunchtime Art Talks
Gerald Davis's The Hugging Thing, 1986, 2007
Prismacolor on paper
50 x 38"

HAMMER Conversations
Bliss Broyard & Rebecca Walker
Bliss Broyard is the author of the collection of stories, My Father, Dancing, a New York Times notable book of the year, and One Drop: My Father’s Hidden Life–A Story of Race &Family Secrets. Her fiction and essays have been anthologized in Best American Short Stories and The Art of the Essay. She is a frequent contributor to Elle Magazine and The New York Times Book Review. Rebecca Walker is the author of To Be Real: Telling the Truth & Changing the Face of Feminism, the bestselling memoir Black, White, & Jewish: Autobiography of a Shifting Self, and her latest memoir, Baby Love: Choosing Motherhood After a Lifetime of Ambivalence. Her essays, articles, and reviews have appeared in The Washington Post, The Huffington Post, and several award-winning anthologies.