by Jeroslyn JoVonn
February 19, 2025
Kwame Alexander will interview The HistoryMakers Founder Julieanna Richardson in honor of the legacy of Nikki Giovanni.
The Artwork Institute of Chicago will shut Black Historical past Month by internet hosting an impactful dialog with Julieanna Richardson, honoring the legacy of the late Nikki Giovanni.
Giovanni, the nice American poet who died at age 81 on Dec. 9, 2024, was a Black arts, tradition, and liberation champion. The famed author and educator was a 2008 recipient of BLACK ENTERPRISE’s Ladies of Energy Legacy Award.
On Thursday, Feb. 27, writer, speaker, educator, and Emmy Award-winning producer Kwame Alexander will interview the founder and government director of The HistoryMakers, Julieanna Richardson, for “An Night With Julieanna Richardson,” the Institute introduced. By way of a sequence of open-ended questions, Richardson will share her lifelong dedication to preserving the legacy of African American tales by way of The HistoryMakers.
In collaboration with The HistoryMakers and The Poetry Basis, the occasion marks the primary time Richardson—who has performed tons of of oral historical past interviews for The HistoryMakers archives—will share her personal life story in a stay, on-stage interview. The occasion will probably be taped for public broadcast and can happen contained in the Artwork Institute of Chicago’s Arthur Rubloff Auditorium from 5:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m.
Richardson based The HistoryMakers in 2000 after conducting her first interview with Black radio government Barry Mayo. As she went on to interview figures like Harry Belafonte, Ruby Dee, and Julian Bond, a pivotal encounter with William Thompson, a World Warfare II Tuskegee Airman, shifted her perspective—highlighting that The HistoryMakers was about extra than simply celebrities.
Impressed by interviews with Thompson and William Sylvester White, each now deceased, Richardson formally launched The HistoryMakers as a nonprofit instructional establishment based mostly in Chicago. For 25 years, it has been devoted to preserving, increasing, and offering entry to an internationally acknowledged archive of hundreds of African American video oral histories.
“It was a kind of moments after I knew I used to be on the precise path,” Richardson instructed Chicago Journal in 2007. “It wasn’t about names, however about discovering historical past in locations the place individuals didn’t know historical past existed.”
Alexander brings his ardour for phrases and literature to the dialog because the interviewer. A poet, Emmy Award-winning producer, and New York Occasions bestselling writer, he has penned 42 books, together with Why Fathers Cry at Evening, Turning into Muhammad Ali (co-authored with James Patterson), and The Crossover, his Newbery Medal-winning novel.
Alexander was just lately appointed the Michael I. Rudell Inventive Director of Literary Arts for Chautauqua Literary Arts. The New York Metropolis native additionally serves as government producer of The Crossover TV sequence on Disney+ and an upcoming animated particular on PBS impressed by his kids’s guide, Acoustic Rooster.
RELATED CONTENT: Black Enterprise Celebrates 15 Years of Honoring the Energy and Legacies of Black Ladies
