Culinary historian, educator and author Michael W. Twitty will present the 2020 Wilma Dykeman Stokely Memorial Lecture. His book, The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South, is a memoir of Southern cuisine and food culture that traces his ancestry and Southern foods from Africa to America and from slavery to freedom. The Cooking Gene won the 2018 James Beard Awards for Best Food Writing and Book of the Year and was a finalist for The Kirkus Prize in nonfiction. Twitty’s lectures provide his perspectives as an African American and a Jewish man on race, culture, food, faith and history.

The Wilma Dykeman Stokely Memorial Lecture honors the late writer, speaker, teacher, historian, environmentalist and friend of local libraries. Speakers represent a wide range of backgrounds but all have a deep connection to one or more of Stokely’s passions: Appalachia, the environment, and racial and gender equity.

This year’s lecture is hosted by Friends of the Knox County Public Library and the Library Society of the University of Tennessee. Other sponsors are the Knox County Public Library, Knox County Public Library Foundation, East Tennessee Historical Society, The Press Room, Union Ave Books, UT Libraries and WUOT.