The Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and A Cappella Books Present WABE's Lois Reitzes in conversation with Patsy Rembert and Erin I. Kelly - Chasing Me to My Grave Virtual Event
In this posthumous work, artist Winfred Rembert relates his life in prose and paintings--vivid, confrontational, revelatory, complex scenes from the cotton fields and chain gangs of the segregated south to the churches and nightclubs of the urban north. This is also the story of finding epic love and with it the courage to revisit a past that begs to remain buried.
The Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and A Cappella Books welcome coauthor Erin I. Kelly and the artist’s wife, Patsy Rembert, a virtual discussion of “Chasing Me to My Grave: An Artist's Memoir of the Jim Crow South” on Thursday, August 17, at 7 PM (EST). Kelley and Rembert will appear in conversation with Lois Reitzes, host of WABE’s “City Lights.”
This event is free and open to the public. Join the event via the Zoom link below.
A Cappella Books will have copies of "Chasing Me to My Grave" available after the event. Pre-order via the link below. At checkout, choose between the local delivery, curbside pick-up, or shipping options. For zip codes not listed in the above banner, select curbside pick-up or USPS shipping.
About the Book
Winfred Rembert grew up in a family of Georgia field laborers and joined the Civil Rights Movement as a teenager. He was arrested after fleeing a demonstration, survived a near-lynching at the hands of law enforcement, and spent seven years on chain gangs. During that time, he met the undaunted Patsy, who would become his wife. Years later, at the age of fifty-one and with Patsy's encouragement, he started drawing and painting scenes from his youth using leather tooling skills he learned in prison.
“Chasing Me to My Grave” presents Rembert's breathtaking body of work alongside his story, as told to Tufts Philosopher Erin I. Kelly. Rembert calls forth vibrant scenes of Black life on Cuthbert, Georgia's Hamilton Avenue, where he first glimpsed the possibility of a life outside the cotton field. As he pays tribute, exuberant and heartfelt, to Cuthbert's Black community and the people, including Patsy, who helped him to find the courage to revisit a traumatic past, Rembert brings to life the promise and the danger of Civil Rights protest, the brutalities of incarceration, his search for his mother's love, and the epic bond he found with Patsy.
“Chasing Me to My Grave” is a searing memoir in prose and painted leather that celebrates Black life and summons readers to confront painful and urgent realities at the heart of American history and society.
About the Authors
Winfred Rembert (1945 - 2021) was an artist from Cuthbert, Georgia. His paintings on carved and tooled leather have been exhibited at museums and galleries across the country, and compared to the work of Jacob Lawrence, Romare Bearden, and Horace Pippin. Rembert was honored by the Equal Justice Initiative in 2015, awarded a United States Artists Barr Fellowship in 2016, and is the subject of two award-winning documentary films: “All Me” and “Ashes to Ashes.” In the last decades of his life, he lived and worked in New Haven, Connecticut.
Erin I. Kelly is a philosophy professor at Tufts University who teaches and writes about ethics, criminal law, and social justice. She is the author of a book about criminal justice called "The Limits of Blame," published with Harvard University Press in 2018. She collaborated with the late Winfred Rembert on his memoir, "Chasing Me to My Grave," which is forthcoming with Bloomsbury in September.
