Dr. Tara Bynum will draw on correspondence between Obour Tanner and her friend Phillis Wheatley, the first published African American poet in America, for the second Lisman Lecture in Early American Book Culture. Dr. Bynum will examine Tanner’s archive of letters to consider what it means to remember a friend while enslaved in the eighteenth century.

Tara Bynum is an Associate Professor of English and American Studies at the University of Iowa and the author of Reading Pleasures: Everyday Black Living in Early America (2023).