Author Panel - Alice Faye Duncan

Alice Faye Duncan

Alice Faye Duncan is the author of (among others) Honey Baby Sugar Child, A Song for Gwendolyn Brooks, and Memphis, Martin, and the Mountaintop, which was awarded a 2019 Coretta Scott King Honor Medal and voted a Best Picture Book in 2018 by Booklist, Kirkus Review, School Library Journal, and the Chicago Public Library.

Alice Faye Duncan, who won the hearts of the entire room as soon as she started speaking, is emphatically from Memphis, and grew up fully immersed in the people and places of the Civil Rights Movement. Her childhood photographer was Ernest Withers, who chronicled the era (including the last days of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.), and a chance encounter with him at a funeral in 2006 planted the seed for a book about the assassination of MLK and the concurrent Memphis sanitation strike.

Memphis, Martin, and the Mountaintop was published in 2017 after an 11-year gestation period, and in 2019 the book received a Coretta Scott King honor medal. She believes she was destined to tell this story, because she is wholeheartedly from and of Memphis, and the people involved in the events of that time were and are her people. She urges us all to do the same for wherever we're from; she calls on us to mine the stories in our cities and our towns.

Follow Alice on Instagram, or visit her website at www.alicefayeduncan.com.