Join us for a Center for Women's Studies Brown Bag Discussion on Post-Katrina Geographies and the African American Novel with Dana Cypress. Cypress is an assistant professor in the Department of English and Creative Writing at Colgate University. She completed her PhD at the University of Pennsylvania.

In August 2005 Hurricane Katrina landed on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, devastating vulnerable communities in Louisiana and Mississippi. Since then, this historic ecological disaster has become an important scene shaping an emerging canon of Black post-Katrina fiction. Contemporary novels by Jesmyn Ward, Kiese Laymon, and T. Geronimo Johnson establish New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast as a Black critical geography that maps the coming-of-age of millennial protagonists managing an onslaught of interrelated crises that are exacerbated by the hurricane and its aftermath.