The SCC Hagan Center for the Humanities kicked off its spring quarter Diversity Dialogue series April 14 with a presentation by Carlos Gil, a retired University of Washington professor who taught the history of Latin America there for over 30 years. His talk explored Mexican immigration by spotlighting his own family’s history. Gil is author of a book “We Became Mexican-American: How Our Immigrant Family Survived to Pursue the American Dream” that traces his family’s history from the 1920s to the 1970s.
Gil’s was the first in a series of five presentations scheduled. Generally the presenters meet with students and faculty in the morning and their early evening lectures are livestreamed for the public from the SCC website at: scc.spokane.edu/live.
The other four lectures lined up through the Hagan Center this year are:
April 27, 5:30 p.m., Angie Thomas, author of the #1 New York Times bestseller “The Hate U Give” and her recently released second novel “On the Come Up.”
May 12, 10:30 a.m. and 6:30 p.m., Luis Rodriguez, who wrote two award-winning autobiographies of growing up with gang violence and addiction in Los Angeles. He was appointed L.A. Poet Laureate by the mayor in 2014.
June 2, 10:30 a.m. and 5 p.m., Hilton Als, who won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 2017 and is a former staff writer for The New Yorker. His most recent book is “White Girls” and he teaches writing at Columbia University.
June 9, 10:30 a.m. and 6:30 p.m., Omari Amili, a Seattle author who found that college classes in prison were his ticket to a better life and he focused his graduate school research on the benefits of education for incarcerated people. Omar also is a Humanities Washington speaker available for booking through June 30.