Leonard Pitts Jr. at BookPeople Tonight
Pulitzer Prize-winning writer reads from 'Freeman'
By Kimberley Jones, 2:12PM, Tue. Jun. 26, 2012
Leonard Pitts Jr. may be better known as a nationally syndicated, Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for the Miami Herald – and best known for his heart-rending Sept. 12, 2001 column, "We'll Go Forward From This Moment" – but tonight he'll be in town talking up his new novel, Freeman.
Freeman takes as its subject another historic moment – the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, when African-Americans attempted the often-dangerous and logistically mind-boggling journey to reconnect with families ripped apart by slavery and ravaged by war. In a May interview with NPR's Audie Cornish, Pitts discussed the impetus of the novel, his second:
"We tend to have this image of the end of the Civil War as being the slaves said, 'OK, we're free now,' and hallelujah and jubilee and threw their hoes down and went on to begin building whatever freedom was going to be. … It was a lot more difficult, painful and complex than that."
Pitts will read from Freeman tonight at 7pm at BookPeople. The Chronicle spoke with Pitts in 2010 about his nonfiction writing; you check that out here.
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