NEWS & EVENTS | News
October 31, 2025
In a pre-publication session in October, I spoke on the podcast The Last Negroes at Harvard. It was a lively session with an engaging and thoughtful group of Harvard grads, some of whom are working on their own ancestral history of enslavement. A recording of the event will be available online.
Scarlett will be featured on Deborah Kalb’s blog, Book Q&As with Deborah Kalb.
John Mason Tison
The remaining Scarlett archival materials—including this daguerreotype, shown here, and multiple other photographs featured in Scarlett—will be sent to the Georgia Historical Society in 2026 as part of the Scarlett-Tison family collection. Last spring I donated the bulk of my personal Scarlett archive to GHS, where the collection is called the Scarlett-Tison family collection. I hope future researchers will benefit from this resource, and I encourage others with access to family papers and items to reach out to relevant archives. This is especially crucial in tracing the history of slavery in the United States, and in particular the history of enslaved African-American, whose lives and very names have too long been obscured.
Last June, Scarlett was introduced at the national gathering of Coming to the Table. The book was also introduced at the 2025 reunion of the Hippard-Blue-Bell Family Reunion in Brunswick, Georgia, in July.
Scarlett will be introduced at the 2025 reunion of the Hippard-Blue-Bell Family Reunion in Brunswick, Georgia, in July, and was introduced at the national gathering of Coming to the Table in June.
While visiting Savannah briefly in March, I donated the bulk of my personal Scarlett archive to the Georgia Historical Society, where the collection will be called the Scarlett-Tison family collection. I hope future researchers will benefit from this resource, and I encourage others with unique family papers and items to reach out to relevant archives. This is especially crucial in tracing the history of slavery in the United States, and in particular the history of enslaved African-American, whose lives and very names have too long been obscured.
Photograph by Philip Wu Jr.
During a visit to Brunswick, Georgia, in March, I met with leaders of BRAG (Bicycle Riding Across Georgia), an organization that among many other great things, conducts a monthly ride dedicated to the memory of the late Ahmad Arbury. It’s called “I Ride with Maud,” and I was honored to meet that month’s team, which included Ahmad Arbery’s father, Marcus, and uncle, Gary.
In February, I spoke by Zoom to Rachel L. Swarn’s class at New York University. The class, “Reporting on Racial Justice,” connects students to writers who are exploring the history of slavery and racial violence in their families. Rachel is the author of The 272: The Families Who Were Enslaved and Sold to Build the American Catholic Church.
On President’s Day 2025, I spoke at a book launch for What the Presidents Read: Childhood Stories and Family Favorites, co-edited by Elizabeth Goodenough and Marilyn S. Olsen. The collection includes my essay “Reading Buchanan,” about Buchanan, John Updike, and my performance as Harriet Lane in the premiere of Updike’s Buchanan Dying. Buchanan’s failure to address the crime of slavery ultimately led to a civil war culminating in the emancipation of enslaved Americans.