Two Alabama natives, widely acclaimed for their insights into education, democracy, and American history, will return home this fall to be celebrated as 2023 Alabama Humanities Fellows.

On Monday, October 23, the Alabama Humanities Alliance (AHA) will honor Dr. Imani Perry and Dr. David David Mathews at the annual Alabama Colloquium, presented by Regions. The event will also feature CNN anchor and Prattville native Kaitlan Collins in conversation with the honorees. Following the colloquium, the AHA will offer a limited-capacity listening tour of the Wallace House in Shelby County. Built in 1841, the Wallace House was once part of a 5,000-acre cotton plantation which was worked by nearly 100 enslaved people. Today, descendants of the home’s white landowners and enslaved Black population are working together to examine their shared history and create a space for mutual understanding and reconciliation at Klein Arts and Culture, an arts organization fostering racial reconciliation through the arts and education.

The AHA will host this year’s colloquium, which runs from 11:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. at the Grand Bohemian Hotel in Mountain Brook. Tickets are available for purchase on the Alabama Humanities website: Admission starts at $75 for virtual tickets. In-person general admission tickets are $100. Full tables of 10 seats are $1,000. Tickets to the tour of the Wallace House are $50.

The Alabama Humanities Alliance awards the annual fellowship to Alabamians who use the humanities — the study of society and culture– to make the state a “smarter, kinder, more vibrant place to live.” Last year, the nonprofit honored Bryan Stevenson and the late John Lewis as its 2022 Alabama Humanities Fellows.

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Imani Perry, a Birmingham native, is a scholar of law, literature, history, and cultural studies, as well as a creative nonfiction author. In 2022, she won the National Book Award for Nonfiction for “South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation.”

Perry has written five other books, including “Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry,” which won the 2019 PEN Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography, and “May We Forever Stand: A History of the Black National Anthem,” winner of the 2019 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Nonfiction. Perry is a professor at the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences and at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute and a contributing writer for The Atlantic, where she pens “Unsettled Territory,” a weekly newsletter that frequently reckons with the past. PEN Birmingham held a four-month discussion for “South to America,” culminating in a night of conversation at Miles College in February. On Sept. 14, Perry will join artist Dawoud Bey at the Birmingham Museum of Art for the annual Chenoweth Lecture. The conversation will explore Bey’s photography series, “The Birmingham Project” which captures the lives and the stories of the people affected by the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing.

David Mathews, a Grove Hill native, has dedicated his life to building community and promoting democracy. Mathews served as a history professor at the University of Alabama from 1965-1980, becoming the youngest president of a major university when he began his UA tenure at age 33. He presided over the integration of the Crimson Tide’s football program under Coach Paul “Bear” Bryant. Mathews also served as U.S. Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare in President Gerald Ford’s administration, where he worked on restoring public confidence in government. Mathews spent four decades as president and CEO of the Kettering Foundation, focusing the nonprofit’s work on engaging citizens in the democratic process.

Founded in 1974, the nonprofit Alabama Humanities Alliance serves as a state affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities. The mission of the Alabama Humanities Alliance is to promote storytelling, learning, and civic engagements through grants and awards.