In partnership with the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy, Diane McWhorter will discuss her book-in-progress, Moon of Alabama: From Nazi Germany to Tranquility Base, via the Segregated American South, about the Third Reich missile pioneers who were brought to Huntsville, Alabama after World War II and went on to build the rocket that put the first man on the moon.
McWhorter is a writer of narrative nonfiction based in New York City. Her first book, Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama, the Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution (Simon & Schuster, 2001), chronicled the civil rights revolution—and her family’s role on the wrong side of it—in her hometown. She is also the author of A Dream of Freedom: The Civil Rights Movement from 1954 to 1968 (Scholastic, 2004), a young adult book.
McWhorter, a graduate of Wellesley College, was a longtime contributor to the New York Times and is on the USA Today board of contributors. Her articles have appeared in the American Scholar, Boston magazine (where she was managing editor), Harper’s, Legal Affairs, The Nation, Slate and Smithsonian magazine. She is a member of the Society of American Historians and has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a Holtzbrinck Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, and a resident scholar at the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center. Carry Me Home won a 2002 Pulitzer Prize, among other awards, and A Dream of Freedom appeared on several "best books" lists.