One Book essay contest winners!

Molly Grace and Andrew Moriarty won the One Book Villanova Essay Contest for their insightful essays on themes portrayed in Tim Tyson’s Blood Done Sign My Name, this year’s choice for University-wide reading.

The awards were presented by library director Joe Lucia on February 15 in a ceremony in Falvey Memorial Library. Grace, a senior English major, and Moriarty, a first year student, talked about the essential ideas presented in their essays and how these related to issues raised by Tyson's work. The complete texts of their papers are available through the Digital Library.

“A Foucauldian Interpretation of Lynching in the Media,” by Molly Grace, initially submitted during the fall 2006 semester to the American Literary Realism & Journalism course taught by English professor Jean Lutes. "Timothy Tyson’s account of the 1970 murder of Henry Marrow in Oxford, North Carolina forces its readers to confront the bloodiness of America’s struggle for racial equality. Like Tyson’s memoir, James Allen’s 2000 publication of Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America, a documentary of lynching photographs and postcards from 1870-1960, also re-calls into question the history of racially-charged lynching in America... "

(The article I submitted as an opinion/editorial to the Villanova Times issue which was distributed February 7, 2007. The article is not surrounding Tyson’s view, but more rooted in it, a personal response to the bigger picture presented in the discussion of, but more the reading of, Blood Done Sign My Name.) "Racial Blindness - Villanova Needs a Cure," by Andrew Moriarty. His op/ed piece originated from his reflections on a class discussion, after Tyson's visit, held in his Honors Augustine and Culture Seminar, taught by Dr. Jack Doody. "If the visit of Timothy Tyson, author of Blood Done Sign My Name, has shown me anything, it is that racism is alive and well here in the affluent North – it just wears a different face..."

In conjunction with the One Book festivities for Blood Done Sign My Name, the Falvey history liaison team, with assistance from others, mounted an exhibit in one of the first floor display cases documenting the history of the civil rights struggle that provided the context for the book.