The 33rd Annual Seaver Lecture is presented by the Humanities Program at the University of Kansas, and co-sponsored by the Hall Center for the Humanities.

This talk will discuss Maya Angelou’s collaboration with Hallmark on the Life Mosaic collection. It will consider the context of this partnership, including why Angelou undertook the enterprise, and the criticism she received for it given her success and acclaim as a poet and memoirist. The talk will explore the Life Mosaic collection’s relationship to Angelou’s published writing and what her body of work suggests about a culture of sentiment.

Ayesha K. Hardison is a literary and cultural critic of African American writing and representation. An Associate Professor of English and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Kansas, she engages questions of race, gender, genre, social politics, and historical memory in her research and teaching. She is the author of Writing through Jane Crowand editor of the journal Women, Gender, and Families of Color. In 2021, she will co-direct a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute on Zora Neale Hurston.

33rd Annual Seaver Lecture: Ayesha Hardison, "Maya Angelou’s Mosaic of Life Writing"