On Wednesday, January 18 at 7 pm, please join your friends and neighbors for a special evening of discussion of the Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir Chasing Me to My Grave: An Artist’s Memoir of the Jim Crow South by Winfred Rembert. The discussion will be led by Mr. Rembert’s daughter Lillian Rembert, as well. as the co-author of Chasing Me to My Grave, Erin I. Kelly. Mr. Rembert passed away in 2021.
Winfred Rembert (1945-2021) grew up in Cuthbert, Georgia, where he picked cotton as a child and later got involved in the civil rights movement. He was arrested in the aftermath of a demonstration, broke out of jail, and survived a near-lynching, He would spend seven years in prison, and was forced to labor on chain gangs.
Following his release, in 1974, he married Patsy, and they eventually settled in New Haven, Connecticut. At the age of fifty-one, with Patsy’s encouragement, he began carving and. painting memories from his youth onto leather, using leather-tooling skills he had learned in prison. His paintings on carved and tooled leather have been exhibited at museums and galleries across the country and compared to the work of Jacob Lawrence, Romare Beardon, and Horace
Pippin. Rembert was honored by the Equal Justice Initiative in 2015 and awarded a United States Artists Barr Fellowship in 2016.
Lillian Rembert is Winfred Rembert’s daughter. She lives in New Haven, CT. Erin I. Kelly is Professor of Philosophy at Tufts University and co-author of Chasing Me to My Grave, which was published in 2021. She is also the author of The
Limits of Blame: Rethinking Punishment and Responsibility. She writes and speaks about ethics and social justice, especially in connection with criminal law.
This even is offered collaboratively by the Weston Public Library, Weston Art & Innovation Center, and Weston Council on Aging. Funding is provided by the Friends of the Weston Public Library.
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