The Legacy of Kathleen Collins and the Future of Black Women Filmmaking

A book talk with LaMonda Horton-Stallings

Moderated by Nina Lorez Collins

Presented by Gender⁺ Justice Initiative, DC Public Library, Women’s and Gender Studies and Women’s Center

Join us in welcoming LaMonda Horton-Stallings for a conversation about her latest book, The Afterlives of Kathleen Collins: A Black Woman Filmmaker’s Search for New Life (2021). In this critically imaginative study of Kathleen Collins, L.H. Stallings narrates how Collins, as a Black woman writer and filmmaker, sought to change the definition of life and living.

L.H Stallings will be in conversation with Nina Lorez Collins.

More about the book:

The Afterlives of Kathleen Collins showcases how Collins used filmmaking, writing, and teaching to assert herself as a poly-creative dedicated to asking and answering difficult philosophical questions about human being and living. Interrogating the ideological foundation of life-writing and cinematic life-writing as they intersect with race and gender, Stallings intervenes on the delimited concepts of life and Black being that impeded wider access, distribution, and production of Collins’s personal, cinematic, literary, and theatrical works.

About the speakers:

L. H. Stallings is Professor in the Department of African American Studies at Georgetown University. She is author of A Dirty South Manifesto: Sexual Resistance and Imagination in the New South (2019); Funk the Erotic: Transaesthetics and Black Sexual Cultures (2015); and Mutha’ Is Half a Word: Intersections of Folklore, Vernacular, Myth, and Queerness in Black Female Culture (2007).

Nina Lorez Collins is a writer, entrepreneur and founder of The Woolfer (new window), an online platform for like-minded women over 40. The community grew out of a closed Facebook group she started in 2015 called “What Would Virginia Woolf Do?” Her book, What Would Virginia Woolf Do? And Other Questions I Ask Myself As I Attempt to Age Without Apology, was published in 2018.