NEW IBERIA, La. --- The Books Along the Teche Literary Festival (April 1-3, 2022) will host a tribute to Dr. Ernest J. Gaines, on Friday, April 1, 2022, from 10:30-11:30 a.m. at the Sliman Theater (129 E. Main St.) in downtown New Iberia.
The free panel, entitled "Remembering Bayonne: A Tribute to Ernest J. Gaines, his life and his legacy," will look at the impact Dr. Gaines had on the literary world and the community that profoundly influenced his fiction.
Panelists will share memories and impressions of the man and the author and discuss how his work and his lifelong mission continue through the Ernest J. Gaines Center at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. The center is the official archives of his work.
Panelists will include:
- Cheylon Woods, the current head and archivist of the Ernest J. Gaines Center. Woods’ job is to encourage the exploration of numerous topics and themes found in Dr. Gaines’s work with researchers all over the world.
- Dianne Saulney Gaines, Dr. Gaines' widow. She worked as an assistant court attorney for Dade County, Fla., and founded the National Bar Association Women Lawyers Division (now known as the Gwen S. Cherry Black Women Lawyers Association). She spent more than 20 years of her life with Dr. Gaines, building institutions, such as the Mount Zion Riverlake Cemetery Association and the Ernest J. Gaines Center, to preserve and uplift the legacy of the Cherie Quarters Community.
- Marcia Gaudet, Ph. D., the first director of the Ernest J. Gaines Center, and one of the founding members of the Ernest J. Gaines Center Board. Gaudet worked with Dr. Gaines in the UL Lafayette English department, and co-authored, co-edited, and wrote numerous articles with and on Dr. Gaines and the impact of his work within folklore and the American canon.
More Dr. Ernest Gaines Events:
The Iberia Performing Arts League will present onstage dialogue and narration from A Gathering of Old Men by Dr. Gaines who was the festival's 2017 Great Southern Writer. The group will read excerpts from the 1983 novel about a murder on a Louisiana plantation.
This free Readers Theater will be held at the Sliman Theater from 4-5 p.m. on Friday, April 1.
About Dr. Ernest Gaines:
Dr. Gaines was born on January 15, 1933, on River Lake Plantation in the small south Louisiana town of Oscar in Pointe Coupee Parish. In his childhood, the center of his world was Cherie Quarter, the former slave quarter on River Lake Plantation, where five generations of his family had lived.
Dr. Gaines joined his parents in California at the age of 15 because there was no high school available to him in that part of rural Louisiana. In 1964, he published his first novel, Catherine Carmier, in response to the lack of a Black perspective throughout southern literature published through the 1960s.
Dr. Gaines achieved both critical and popular acclaim in 1971 with his novel The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman. The 1974 movie adaptation won nine Emmy Awards, including Cicely Tyson’s Best Actress Award for the title role.
Dr. Gaines’ works are translated into 19 languages. Four of his works have been made into films (The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, 1974; The Sky Is Gray, 1980; A Gathering of Old Men, 1987; and A Lesson Before Dying, 1999). In addition, Dr. Gaines’ life and work are the subject of three documentary films, numerous scholarly books and doctoral dissertations.
Among his other honors, Dr. Gaines was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters, received the National Governor’s Association Award for his lifetime contribution to the arts, and the Louisiana Center for the Book Writer of the Year Award. He also received the Aspen Prize for Literature, the Cleanth Brooks Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Fellowship of Southern Writers, the Sidney Lanier Prize for Southern Literature, the Celebration of Black Writing Lifetime Achievement Award, and the North Star Award — Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Foundation's Legacy Award.
In 2015, he and his wife Dianne Saulney Gaines received the Foundation for Historic Louisiana Award for preserving the Cherie Quarter Church and Cemetery at River Lake Plantation. After his retirement, the Gaines built a home on property along False River that was once part of the plantation where he was born.
