Delta Authors on Tour brings books, literacy mission to Kansas City
KANSAS CITY, Mo. — One group of Delta Sigma Theta sorority sisters is promoting literacy and giving readers a chance to find a wide variety of Black authors this weekend.
It’s called Delta Authors on Tour and it helps the sorority fulfill its service mission while expanding representation in published works.
“Without the word, without the written word, everything else pales,” said “Nights Over Egypt” author Barbara Keaton. “You have to know how to read in order to write, to be able to do math, to be able to function. Literacy is not just a book. Literacy is life to me.”
That’s at least partially because Keaton is an author and adult literacy instructor in Chicago, helping other people learn to read to help in all other facets of their lives.
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She’s joining five other Delta authors who fall into a variety of genres sharing the black perspective in a way Keaton says is sometimes hard to find in literature.
“We just were not seeing us,” Keaton said. “We were not seeing us depicted in a variety of lights. We were very one-dimensional.”
She writes black romance novels while Ann Champion Shaw penned a memoir that chronicles 40 years of her life while drawing parallels to popular Black TV shows.
“Because I think we find that that’s why we’re drawn to a lot of these television shows because I can see myself in that,” said Champion Shaw.
Her book takes readers through good and bad times of what started as an upper-middle class lifestyle.
“Soon after, things got real,” Champion Shaw said. “Tragedy struck in a sense for a little girl like myself, where divorce happened, where we went from a lifestyle of privilege to a lifestyle of poverty and hardships and struggles and challenges.”
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The event is Saturday, April 13, 2024 from 3 p.m. to 6 p.m. at UMKC’s Student Union Theatre.
