Lillian Rembert and Erin I. Kelly, in conversation with one another, will discuss Winfred Rembert’s memoir, Chasing Me To My Grave: An Artists’s Memoir of the Jim Crow South, as told to Erin I. Kelly (Bloomsbury, 2021). In 2022 Chasing Me To My Grave was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in the category of biography. This special event will feature Lillian and Erin’s reflections about the book and Winfred’s life. They will also present slides of his remarkable paintings on leather.

Winfred Rembert (1945-2021) grew up in Cuthbert, Georgia, where he picked cotton as a child. As a teen-ager, he got involved in the civil-rights movement and was arrested in the aftermath of a demonstration. He later broke out of jail, survived a near-lynching, and spent seven years in prison, where he was forced to labor on chain gangs. Following his release, in 1974, he married Patsy, and they eventually set¬tled in New Haven, Connecticut. At the age of fifty-one, with Patsy’s en¬couragement, he began carving and painting memories from his youth onto leather, using leather-tooling skills he had learned in prison. 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 Beardon, and Horace Pippin. Rembert was honored by the Equal Justice Initiative in 2015 and awarded an United States Artists Barr Fellowship in 2016.

Lillian Rembert is Winfred Rembert’s daughter. She lives in New Haven, CT.

Erin I. Kelly is Professor of Philosophy at Tufts University and co-author of Chasing Me to My Grave. She is also the author of The Limits of Blame: Rethinking Punishment and Responsibility (Harvard University Press, 2018). She writes and speaks about ethics and social justice, especially in connection with criminal law.

This event will be held at the Weston Town Hall Auditorium. 

Listen to the book free with your library card on Hoopla: https://www.hoopladigital.com/title/14952839