Tag: Spelman College

The Atlanta University Center has shaped generations of leaders—for the nation and for their home city. Atlanta would be nothing like it is today without it.

When it comes to HBCU homecomings, we all think our school does it best. In fairness, the title, according to pretty much everybody, has long been held by Howard University. That is, until now. Brothers and sisters, there’s a new champion, it’s right here in ATL, and it’s called “SpelHouse.”

Wednesday morning is quiet on the Spelman College campus—right up until 11:50 a.m., when classes let out. Students rush to get to the dining hall, where two lines snake around the cafeteria and spill out the doors. Elsewhere it’s just any old weekday, but at Spelman it’s a special occasion: It’s Fried Chicken Wednesday.

New Student Orientation at Spelman and Morehouse was a bittersweet rite of passage for the class of 2027 and their parents.

This summer, we gathered Spelman College alumnae from across different generations to talk about how the school shaped their lives. They talked about sisterhood, scholarship, and how their college days intersected with pivotal moments in Atlanta history, from the civil rights movement to the pandemic.

There are a fount of art offerings on the Atlanta University Center’s campuses—and cross-institutional programming and curriculum to glue it all together. Here's what you can see on campus now.

A roundup of yearbook photos of famous Atlanta University Center alumni, including Martin Luther King Jr., Samuel L. Jackson. Raphael Warnock, Stacey Abrams, Tayari Jones, and more.

Tayari Jones—author, professor, and griot of the American South—has a lot on her plate. She teaches a creative writing class at Emory University, she has book blurbs due and forewords to file, and she has words in a just-released craft book, How We Do It, where her Emory colleague Jericho Brown gathered Black writers to explain “how they go about making what they make.” “I know I have a novel,” Jones writes, “when I have a question to which I don’t know the moral/ethical answer.” She is also putting the finishing touches on her fifth and forthcoming novel, Old Fourth Ward, which is set squarely in Black Atlanta’s centers of gravity: the historic neighborhood adjacent to downtown Atlanta (and the book’s namesake) and Cascade Heights (her old stomping grounds).

In 1988, a group of writers gathered on the steps of Spelman College’s Rockefeller Fine Arts building to fete Dr. Johnnetta B. Cole, who, that weekend, had become the college’s first Black woman president. We had just gotten out of a wonderful program honoring Dr. Cole and Black women in the arts. People were talking, laughing, and greeting each other . . . Everybody was high off the charge of the whole gathering: This was the culmination of a decades-long discussion of who should lead this historically Black institution, and this was a celebration of the leadership of Black women in many different fields, particularly in scholarship, in literature, and in the arts.

Spring is here, and with it, a new selection of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry books to check out. Here are six from Atlanta authors to add to your reading list.