Workshop Series: "Mississippi Reconciliation" with Lewis Hyde

Lewis Hyde is a cultural critic with a particular interest in the public life of the imagination. His 1983 book, The Gift, illuminates and defends the non-commercial portion of artistic practice. Trickster Makes This World (1998) uses a group of ancient myths to argue for the kind of disruptive intelligence all cultures need if they are to remain lively, flexible, and open to change. Hyde's most recent book, Common as Air, is a defense of the "cultural commons." 

A MacArthur Fellow and former director of undergraduate creative writing at Harvard University, Hyde teaches during the fall semesters at Kenyon College, where he is the Thomas Professor of Creative Writing. During the rest of the year he lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he is an affiliate of Harvard's Mahindra Humanities Center.

Hyde was a volunteer in the 1964 "Freedom Summer" effort to organize the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party.  He is at work on a new book, A Primer for Forgetting, a part of which revisits the violence of that summer.