Last week, I took the “Page 99 test.” If you’re not familiar with it, novelist and critic Ford Madox Ford believed that one should “open the book to page ninety-nine and read, and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you.” So I applied this to page 99 of Power to the Poor. Here’s the full report!

Clearly, I have not quite gotten the hang of writing my own blog in any consistent way. I would like to blame the holidays, the flu that turned into pneumonia (despite receiving a flu shot!), January conference travel, and the beginning weeks of the spring semester. But I also have experienced a certain amount of inertia in dedicating the time to writing here more than once a month, if that.

But now that Power to the Poor is only three weeks away from its release date – on February 25 – I suddenly have more inspiration. Imagine that. More than anything, I am excited about the prospect of introducing the book to the world through a pair of book talks and signings here in the Triangle. On Thursday, February 28, I will speak about the book at the Regulator Bookshop here in Durham, from 7 until 8 or 8:30 p.m. Since 2002, I have been doing business with the Regulator, a Durham institution aptly named after the North Carolina farmers who rebelled years before the American Revolution. And since 2006, I have made sure to order my textbooks through the Regulator for my history and writing courses at Duke. I am very much looking forward to this event.

For those in Chapel Hill and Carrboro, I will speak and sign books at Flyleaf Books a week later on Thursday, March 7. I look forward to contributing in a small way to the rich intellectual tradition we have in the Triangle amid all the basketball rivalry talk this time of year. I am also looking forward to this visit, and I promise not to make any Tar Heel cracks while I am there!

Seriously, if you are interested in hearing more about the book and my research, I invite you to come to one of these events. I promise an engaging discussion about Martin Luther King Jr., antipoverty activism, civil rights memory, and what all of this might mean for today’s attempts at multiracial coalition-building. I look forward to meeting you.