Alice Dunbar-Nelson: A Respectable Activist in the Late Victorian Age

Dr. Tara Green discusses poet, educator, and activist Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s early years in New Orleans and Brooklyn from her new book.

By the time Alice Dunbar-Nelson published her first volume of fiction and poems in 1895, she had begun her career as an English teacher and respectable activist. It was also in that year that she began corresponding with the well-known writer Paul Laurence Dunbar who would become her first of three husbands. This presentation will provide participants with an overview of her early years in New Orleans but will focus primarily on her life in Brooklyn.

Tara T. Green, PhD is Founding Department Chair and CLASS Professor of African American Studies at the University of Houston where she teaches Black Women’s studies and literature courses. She is the author of Reimagining the Middle Passage: Black Resistance in Literature, Television, and Spring (2018), the award-winning A Fatherless Child: Autobiographical Perspectives of African American Men (2009) and See Me Naked: Black Women Defining Pleasure during the Interwar Era (2022), and she is also the editor of two books.