Creative Intelligence

Presented in collaboration with the Bingham Center for Teaching Excellence

Akilah Hughes is an award-winning podcast host of Crooked Media’s What a Day daily news podcast, a USC MacArthur Foundation Civic Media Fellow, and the author of Obviously: Stories from my Timeline for Penguin Random House. Akilah has created hundreds of videos garnering more than 100 million views across the internet for companies like HBO, Comedy Central, ABC, and her own YouTube channel since 2013. Her latest project is Rebel Spirit, a podcast in which she returns to her hometown of Florence, KY to try to convince her high school to change their dated, racist mascot, “The Rebels,” into something “everyone in the south loves.”

Presented in collaboration with the Bingham Center for Teaching Excellence and the Hazelrig Lecture Series for the Humanities and Social Sciences

Amrita Chakrabarti Myers is a historian of Black Women, whose research focuses on race, gender, power, and freedom in the Old South. Her first book, Forging Freedom: Black Women and the Pursuit of Liberty in Antebellum Charleston, was published by UNC Press in 2011. Her second monograph, The Vice President’s Black Wife: The Untold Life of Julia Chinn, was released by UNC/Ferris & Ferris Books in late 2023 and has already garnered numerous honors (the “Vice President” to whom the book title refers is Richard Mentor Johnson, a Transylvania University graduate).

Dr. Myers has been the recipient of several awards for her scholarship, including the 2012 Julia Cherry Spruill Book Prize from the Southern Association of Women Historians and the 2011 Anna Julia Cooper-C.L.R. James Book Prize from the National Council for Black Studies. She currently serves as the Director of Graduate Studies and the Ruth N. Halls Professor of History at Indiana University in Bloomington.

Renowned poet and professor Nikky Finney has spent her career illuminating the Southern cultural and political heritage of Black people in ways that resonate throughout the country and world. Her ongoing legacy of poignant expression, indomitable truth, and devotion to social justice has enriched the country and world.

Finney’s love of writing and poetry began during her childhood in South Carolina. Born in Conway, SC, she is the daughter of Ernest A. Finney, Jr. and Frances Davenport Finney. She began taking notes on the world when she was just a girl growing up in South Carolina. She further heeded this calling by earning her bachelor’s degree in English Literature at Talladega College in 1979. The influence of the Civil Rights and Black Arts Movements, and her parents’ social activism led her to pursue additional education in African American Studies at Atlanta University. In her career of more than 30 years, Finney has written six books and hundreds of poems and essays that explore and confront the experiences that have shaped life in the South for herself and countless other African Americans. Her most recent book, Love Child’s Hotbed of Occasional Poetry (Northwestern University Press, 2020) is an enduring love song to her father and 400 years of African American fight and ingenuity.

Finney’s work has attracted awards from organizations across the country, including the PEN American Open Book Award in 1999 and the Benjamin Franklin Award for Poetry in 2004; the GCLS Literary Award in 2012; several awards from the Kentucky Arts Council and Kentucky Foundation for Women; the Aiken-Taylor Award from the Sewanee Review and the University of the South; the Wallace Stevens Award, given annually by the Academy of American Poets to recognize outstanding and proven mastery in the art of poetry, and most famously, the National Book Award for Poetry for her 2011 book Head Off & Split.

She is presently a Chancellor of the American Academy of Poets and recently inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. At the University of South Carolina, she holds the John H. Bennett, Jr. Chair in Creative Writing and Southern Literature and a Carolina Distinguished Professorship. She has recently been appointed the Executive Director of the newly launched Ernest A. Finney, Jr. Cultural Arts Center in Columbia, a 21st century arts and cultural center named for her father, an exciting endeavor deeply planted in the twin soils of creativity and Black cultural expression.

Tickets available Jan. 6, 2026

Funded by the William R. Kenan Jr. Fund

Please keep checking for more details – TBA

Presented in collaboration with the Bingham Center for Teaching Excellence

Hala Alyan is a licensed clinical psychologist, professor at New York University, and writer. Her work grapples heroically with themes of family, displacement, belonging, and what ‘home’ means. Of her work, author Fatimah Asghar writes, “I feel honored to be alive in a time where I can read Hala Alyan.”

Hala was born in Carbondale, Illinois, and grew up in Kuwait, Oklahoma, Texas, Maine, and Lebanon. She earned a BA from the American University of Beirut and an MA from Columbia University. While completing her doctorate in clinical psychology from Rutgers University, she specialized in trauma and addiction work with various populations.

She is the author of the novel Salt Houses, which was the winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Arab American Book Award, and a finalist for the Chautauqua Prize. Ru Freeman writes about Salt Houses: “Hala Alyan shows how we carry our origins in our hearts wherever we may roam, and how that history is calibrated by the places we choose to put down roots. This is a book with the power to both break and mend your heart.” Her latest novel, The Arsonists’ City, was a finalist for the 2022 Aspen Words Literary Prize. She is also the author of five award-winning collections of poetry, most recently The Moon That Turns You Back. Her memoir I’ll Tell You When I’m Home was published in June 2025.

She lives in Brooklyn with her family.

Madeline ffitch is the author of the story collection VALPARAISO, ROUND THE HORN and the novel STAY AND FIGHT, which was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway award, the Lambda Literary award in Lesbian fiction, the LA Times Book Award and the Washington State Book Award. ffitch’s work has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, The Paris Review, and has been awarded two O. Henry Prizes, in 2024 and 2025. She is included in the 2024 edition of Best American Short Stories. Her second novel, about kitchen table antifascism in Appalachia, is forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ffitch writes and organizes in Appalachian Ohio.