On October 23, the Alabama Humanities Alliance presents the 2023 Alabama Colloquium, sponsored by Regions. This annual gathering celebrates the power of the humanities — including literature! — to lift up Alabama. We’ll also honor our Alabama Humanities Fellows of 2023: acclaimed scholars, historians, and community-builders, David Mathews and Imani Perry. Both have authored numerous books, with Perry winning the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2022.

The day’s program will include an enlightening conversation between the honorees, as well as an introduction of AHA’s newest collaboration, Healing History. This initiative is designed to strengthen our communities and state by helping neighbor better know neighbor — across race, religion, political affiliation, and all those other frequent dividing lines that shouldn’t keep us apart.

Post-event, AHA will offer a limited-capacity listening tour of Wallace House, run by Klein Arts & Culture in Shelby County. Built in 1841, the Wallace House was once part of a 5,000-acre cotton plantation, which was worked by nearly 100 enslaved people. Today, descendants of the home’s White landowners and enslaved Black population work together to examine their shared history and create a space for mutual understanding and reconciliation.