co-sponsored event: "This Fragile Life: A Dialogue on Family and Mental Illness with Charlotte Pierce-Baker"

Charlotte Pierce Baker will lead a conversation about mental illness -a topic that is so often kept in silence - and the family.  Her presentation will engage the audience “as participant” in order to create an atmosphere of sharing. She will intersperse explanation and information with passages read from her most recent book,  This Fragile Life:  A Mother’s Story of a Bipolar Son – all the while, inviting questions and comments from the audience.  

Charlotte Pierce-Baker, Ph.D. is a scholar, activist, teacher, and author. She is a Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies/ English at Vanderbilt University. Pierce-Baker’s groundbreaking first book, Surviving the Silence:  Black Women’s Stories of Rape (W.W. Norton, 1998), continues to provide a forum for the heretofore- unheard voices of African American women surviving the trauma of rape and sexual violence. Her most recent publication, a memoir/ biography titled This Fragile Life:  A Mother’s Story of a Bipolar Son (Lawrence Hill Books, June, 2012) is now in bookstores and available on the Internet.  It is the narrative of an African American family struggling with bipolar disorder. Pierce-Baker resides in Nashville, TN with her husband who is also on faculty at Vanderbilt.

From the Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life.  Co-sponsored by the Institute for Research in African-American Studies and the Institute for Research on Women and Gender.

For a map of the location, please click here.