Bowdoin College professor Tess Chakkalakal will be in conversation with Freeporter Tom Whelan at Freeport Community Library to discuss her most recent publication, A Matter of Complexion: The Life and Fictions of Charles W. Chesnutt. A complex and talented man, Chesnutt was born in 1858 in Cleveland to parents who were considered “mixed race.” He spent his early life in North Carolina after the Civil War. Though light-skinned, Chesnutt remained a member of the black community throughout his life.  

Through his literary work, as a writer, critic, and speaker, Chesnutt transformed the publishing world by crossing racial barriers that divided black writers from white and seamlessly including both Black and white characters in his writing. In A Matter of Complexion, Bowdoin professor Chakkalakal pens the biography of a poor teacher raised in rural North Carolina during Reconstruction who became the first professional African American writer to break into the all-white literary establishment and win admirers as diverse as William Dean Howells, Booker T. Washington, Ida B. Wells, and Lorraine Hansberry. 

Tess Chakkalakal has published widely on nineteenth-century African American and American literature. She is the author of Novel Bondage: Slavery, Marriage, and Freedom in Nineteenth-Century America which earned the Robert K. Martin Prize for best book on American literature and "a must read" title by Choice. She is also creator, executive producer, and co-host for the podcast Dead Writers, which takes listeners inside famous American authors’ homes.  

Copies of A Matter of Complexion will be available to purchase from Kelly’s Books to Go. For questions or directions to the library, call 207-865-3307.