Contribute to the Annual Fund

Dear Toni Morrison Society Members and Friends,

We hope that you had a wonderful Thanksgiving and that your year is ending on a high note.

For the Toni Morrison Society, 2017 was a year of focused programs, new organizational changes, 25th Anniversary program planning, and celebration of the many accomplishments of Toni Morrison.

The Society began the year preparing for the election of new officers and reviewing a group of excellent proposals for the outstanding ALA panel and roundtable discussion on “Toni Morrison and Citizenship.” Over the summer and during the new officers retreat this fall, we worked with our new officers to prepare bylaws revisions for review at the ALA business meeting, develop the new call for papers for the 2018 ALA panels, create new fundraising strategies, and plan for our upcoming 25th Anniversary Year. We also placed our 22nd Bench by the Road in a lovely community event in Adrian, Michigan and celebrated with Toni Morrison as she gave the Norton Lectures at Harvard in March, spoke on the 50th anniversary of the Martin Luther King Lecture at Kleinhaus Music Hall in Buffalo, and served as the keynote speaker for the Princeton Slavery and Justice Conference where a new building, Morrison Hall, was named in her honor in November.

We are looking forward to 2018: We will have a year-long series of events to celebrate our 25th Anniversary year, which we will kick off in February in Washington, DC at Howard University with a National Toni Morrison Read-In and the launch of our first Short Fiction Writing Contest. This event will be followed in April at Oberlin College with the Third Annual Toni Morrison Society Lecture and the announcement of the Short Fiction Prize Winners. In May, at the American Literature Association Meeting in San Francisco, the Society will present a scholarly panel on Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, and Ta-Nehisi Coates and host a roundtable discussion on public history and the work of the public intellectual. At the ALA meeting, we will also present the 2018 Toni Morrison Society Book Prize Winners at the African American Literature and Culture Society Reception. The 25th Anniversary year will culminate in September in Atlanta with a conference on “Toni Morrison and Black Women Writers: The Next Generation.”

We appreciate the many ways that you have supported the Society over the years, and we hope that, as we close out 2017, you will continue to support the work of the Society with a tax-deductible financial contribution.

Please click here to contribute to the TMS 2017 Annual Fund. Contributions made by midnight December 31, 2017 can be reported on your 2017 taxes.

Thank you in advance for your contribution. We look forward to hearing from you and to seeing you at many of the 25th Anniversary events in 2018.

Best wishes for the holidays and coming New Year!

Sincerely,

The Toni Morrison Annual Fund Committee