Local activist and writer Clare Hanrahan will present her new book, The Half-Life of a Free Radical: Growing Up Irish Catholic in Jim Crow Memphis, and speak on the importance of telling one's story in the context of the political and social realities of the times. Clare will describe the realities of institutional racism as practiced in Memphis in the 1950s and 1960s, how it evolved after Civil War and how it is sustained today.

Clare Hanrahan is an Asheville, NC author, activist, organizer and wayside gardener who has been participating in and reporting on direct action events throughout the Southeast for decades. She was a founding editor of Asheville Global Report, a contributor to the Veterans for Peace publication, The War Crimes Times and a long-time member of National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee. She is a founding organizer with New South Network of War Resisters. She has lived and worked for peace and justice in Tennessee, North Carolina and Florida. She is a graduate of Southern Methodist University and deepened her education during a six-month prison sentence at Alderson Federal Prison in 2001-02 for peaceful protest in the campaign to close the U.S. Army School of Americas at Fort Benning, Ga. She is author of Jailed for Justice: A Woman's Guide to Federal Prison Camp and Conscience & Consequence, A Prison Memoir.