BATON ROUGE, La. – The Louisiana Center for the Book in the State Library of Louisiana and Lieutenant Governor Billy Nungesser will celebrate Women’s History Month with a virtual presentation featuring New Orleans native and Women’s history scholar Miki Pfeffer. The theme for the 2023 National Women’s Month “Celebrating Women Who Tell Our Stories.” The presentation profiles the Women’s Department at the World’s Industrial and Cotton Centennial Exposition in New Orleans in 1885. Viewers will learn about the popular literary section and how a special collection of books was donated to circulate among New Orleans women after the Fair. The recorded presentation will be available on YouTube and Facebook on Wednesday, March 29, 2023.
Dr. Miki Pfefferis an independent scholar who studies Women’s literary and social history, especially nineteenth- and early twentieth-century women in the South. Her books are Southern Ladies and Suffragists: Julia Ward Howe and Women’s Rights at the 1884 New Orleans World’s Fair (University Press of Mississippi, 2014) and A New Orleans Author in Mark Twain’s Court: Letters from Grace King’s New England Sojourns (Louisiana State University Press, 2019).
Pfeffer has written on these subjects for scholarly journals and for collections of essays and has presented at scholarly conferences and to various local groups and Mark Twain venues. She earned an MA in English Literature and a Ph. D. in Urban History, both from the University of New Orleans. She continues to transcribe all correspondence in the Grace King Papers and is currently investigating the career of Ruth McEnery Stuart, who wrote in the same era.
Southern Ladies and Suffragists: Julia Ward Howe and Women’s Rights at the 1884 New Orleans World’s Fairis available for purchase through Cavalier House Books, the Louisiana Book Festival’s bookseller. Use code WHM2023 for a 20% discount at checkout.
The Louisiana Center for the Book, established in the State Library of Louisiana in 1994 for the purpose of stimulating public interest in reading, books, literacy, and libraries and celebrating Louisiana’s rich literary heritage, is the state affiliate of the Library of Congress Center for the Book. For more information, please visit www.LouisianaBookFestival.organd follow us on Facebook.
