2003 Literacy Luncheon

"Captain Ahab was neither my first husband nor my last." So begins Sena Jeter Naslund's novel, Ahab's Wife, a story that Publisher's Weekly calls a "sweeping, yet intimate picture of a remarkable woman who both typifies and transcends her times." Ms. Naslund captured the audience at the April 2003 Literacy Luncheon in Oak Ridge with readings from her most famous novel to date. Prior to her reading, she talked about her early love of and fascination by books, telling the audience that as a child of 10, she sought to read every book whose title she knew, since, if she knew the title, it must be famous and worth reading. She remembered her growing up years when her mother would read aloud to her and described how she has tried to instill that same love of reading and being read to in her own daughter.

Dr. Barbara Hatton, President of the 128-year-old Knoxville College, and former deputy director of the Ford Foundation, introduced Dr. Naslund, noting their mutual historic roots in 1960's Birmingham and the effects of those times on their lives.