Oklahoma City University | Let's Talk About It! Book Club Skip to content

Let's Talk About It! Book Club

Decades in the making, our series, Let's Talk About It, Oklahoma!, remains one of our most popular events. Every semester, a new theme is selected for this Oklahoma Humanities-sponsored book club series. Books are free to borrow from the program and anyone may participate. Join us for illuminating presentations and community-building through group discussions. Delve into topics from civil rights, to history, to mystery — and beyond!

Current Season of Let’s Talk About It! at OCU

Free loaner copies of books available this summer at Dulaney-Browne Library! Availability is on a first-come, first-serve basis.

This season's theme:

"Of Shadows and Light: Stories of African American Resilience"

A More Perfect Union Theme

Over the past century, African Americans have labored to shatter the crucible of racism. Presently, this incredible saga of Black resilience has become highly politicized. Learning about the African American experience can be painful, but it can also be enriching. It can be simultaneously unsettling and beautiful, familiar and yet, strange—but most of all it presents a deeper dimension to the American story as African American novelist Richard Wright (1941) pointed out. “We Black folk,” he wrote, “our history and our present being, are a mirror of all the manifold experiences of America. What we want, what we represent, what we endure is what America is.” Like all ethnic groups within the United States, African Americans have a unique history that contextualizes their experiences, both on an individual level and collectively. This history contains the legacies of slavery and segregation. Even though the tangible relics of slavery and Jim Crow have been retired to museums long ago, systemic racism and bigotry remain in the 21st century. Barriers to economic opportunity, inequities within the justice system, voting restrictions, ghettoization, failing educational systems, police brutality, and micro-aggressions persist as signposts of an earlier time in the nation’s history. Yet, Black people have managed to make lives for themselves, to be creative, and to have the courage to remind the nation that “We, too, are America” with the same aspirations and dreams as everyone else. However, discussing the African American experience can be difficult because of the history of racism that envelops it.

This series on the modern African American experience explores the theme of resilience in the struggle against marginalization and exclusion that have historically shaped Black life. Collectively, these works not only give insight into the endeavor of trying to find a sense of place and belonging within American society, but also challenge us to reflect upon the meaning of the democratic ideals that bind Americans together.

To learn more about the books and theme, click here for a copy of the full series essay. Printed copies of the theme essay will also be available with book check-out. If the program's copies of the books run out, community members are also welcome to join with their own copies! 

The program will begin September 10th and books will come available for checkout this summer. Stay tuned for more details!

All sessions will take place at 6:30 p.m. Tuesdays, at Oklahoma City University 
Petree College of Arts & Sciences Walker Center, Room 151 
NW 26th and N. Florida 

Each session features a short lecture, followed by small-group discussion of the book.

DATEBOOK TITLEPRESENTER
SEPT. 10A Matter of Black and White by Ada Lois Sipuel Fisher (1996)            Dr. Sunu Kodumthara, SWOSU Professor of History
SEPT. 24                Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates (2015)Dr. Cedric Tolliver, African American literature specialist from OU  
OCT. 8Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine (2014)
 
Dr. Tracy Floreani, Center Director
 
OCT. 22
 
Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neal Hurston (1937)
 
Dr. Kalenda Eaton, Professor in Clara Luper Department of African and African American Studies at OU
 
NOV. 12
 
The Cross and the Lynching Tree by James Cone (2011)
 
Rev. Valerie Steele, Lead Pastor at Quail Springs United Methodist Church
 

 

Free parking is available in the lots surrounding the building.

Thanks to our partnership with Oklahoma Humanities, we've been given the ability to go back in time! Take a trip down memory lane and scroll through an extensive list of every Let's Talk About It theme from the past.


YEARTHEME
SPRING 2024Where We Come Together
FALL 2023Native American Identity: From Past to Present
SPRING 2023                              Immigration Stories in Contemporary Fiction: Suspended Between Borders
FALL 2022Speculative Women, Future Bodies
SPRING 2022Memories, Memorials, & Painful Pasts: A More Perfect Union Theme
FALL 2021Travel, New Ways of Seeing
SPRING 2020Working to Survive, Surviving to Work
FALL 2019Coming and Going in Oklahoma Indian Country
SPRING 2019Wade in the Water
FALL 2018Living with Limits
SPRING 2018War, Not War, and Peace: A Pulitzer Prize Centennial Series
FALL 2017The American Frontier: A Pulitzer Prize Centennial Series
SPRING 2017Young Adult Crossover Fiction: Crumbling Borders between Adolescents and Adults                           
FALL 2016Civil Rights and Equality: A Pulitzer Prize Centennial Series
SPRING 2016Play Ball
FALL 2015Hope Amidst Hardships
SPRING 2015The Dynamics of Dysfunction: To Laugh or Cry or Both
FALL 2014Oklahoma Private Investigations
SPRING 2014Muslim Journeys: American Stories
FALL 2013Making Sense of the American Civil War
SPRING 2013Myth and Literature
FALL 2012Native American Writers of the Plains
SPRING 2012The Oklahoman Experience: From Wilderness to Metropolis
FALL 2011Much Depends on Dinner: What We Eat and What It Says About Us
SPRING 2011What America Reads: Myth Making in Popular Fiction
FALL 2010Rebirth of a Nation: Nationalism and the Civil War
SPRING 2010Journey Stories
FALL 2009The Worst Hard Time Revisited: Oklahoma in the Dust Bowl Years
SPRING 2009Do You See What I See: Growing Up in the Wide World? Contemporary World Literature
FALL 2008American Icons: The American President
SPRING 2008Mysterious Fears and Ghastly Longings
FALL 2007Crime and Comedy: The Lighter Side of Crime and Misdemeanor
SPRING 2007The Oklahoma Experience: The Thirties
FALL 2006Invisibility and Identity: The Search for Self in African American Fiction
SPRING 2006The Journey Inward: Women's Autobiography
FALL 2005Piercing the Quilt, Stirring the Stew: Ethnic American Women's Voices
SPRING 2005The Oklahoma Experience: Re-Vision - Reading and Discussing
FALL 2004Vietnam
SPRING 2004Crime and Punishment
FALL 2003The American Renaissance
SPRING 2003Friendship in Literature: Reading and Discussing
FALL 2002The Gilded Age: The Emergence of Modern America
SPRING 2002Private Investigations: Hard-Boiled and Soft-Hearted Heroes
FALL 2001Liberty and Violence: The Heritage of the French Revolution
SPRING 2001Many Trails, Many Tribes: Images of American Indians in Contemporary Fiction
FALL 2000Individual Rights and Community in America
SPRING 2000Making a Living, Making a Life: Work and its Rewards in a Changing America
FALL 1999The Unknown Americans: Contemporary Latin American Literature
SPRING 1999Generation to Generation: Contemporary Young Adult Fiction
FALL 1998Being Ethnic, Becoming American: Struggles, Successes, Symbols
SPRING 1998Writing Worlds: The Art of Seeing in Anthropology, Fiction, and Autobiography

For more information, check out the Oklahoma Humanities Website

Back to Top