Tinner Hill Heritage Foundation Online Talk with Author Jeffrey Blount

Description

The City of Falls Church and Mary Riley Styles Public Library invite you to an online talk with Jeffrey Blount, author of The Emancipation of Evan Walls on Wednesday, August 26, 7:00 - 8:00 PM. It includes a discussion about racial bullying followed by a brief audience Q&A session. To request a Zoom invitation, please email Marshall Webster: mwebster@fallschurchva.gov
 
Jeffrey Blount, a local resident, is an Emmy award-winning television director, spending over 3 decades at NBC, and a 2016 inductee to the Virginia Communications Hall of Fame. He'll be interviewed by Jeanne Meserve, an award-winning anchor and correspondent formerly with CNN and ABC News, who now works worldwide, as a moderator and a security analyst for Canada’s CTV News. She is married to Jeffrey Blount.


The Emancipation of Evan Walls

Olivette Petersen, Southern Lit Alliance: The Emancipation of Evan Walls is Blount's third novel and presents a harrowing glimpse of the South during the Civil Rights Movement of the late 1960s. It's told through the eyes of a young black child struggling to overcome the obstacles in the way of his dream to forge a life for himself. The novel is a reflection on Evan’s painful experience being a sharp, intelligent child with courageous aspirations, who finds himself caught “in a crossfire of hate” between the black and white communities who force him into isolation.

Joe Madison, SeriousXM: It is June 1968. The Civil Rights movement is winding down after the death of Martin Luther King, Jr. Negroes in the town of Canaan, Virginia have been used to acting the same, thinking the same and sharing in the unadulterated hatred of a common enemy. Evan is ten years old and, in the jargon of the times, young, gifted and black. In the presence of his parents and a summer porch gathering of their friends, he makes a startling declaration. From that moment on, the central question of his life is born. Is he black enough?