Harper Lee, author of the beloved novel, “To Kill a Mockingbird” will be inducted into the Alabama Writer’s Hall of Fame on Monday evening June 8th, in Tuscaloosa. Lee, 89, is part of an inaugural class of twelve writers.
Other inductees include Pulitzer Prize-winner Rick Bragg, Andrew Glaze, Sonia Sanchez, and Sena Jeter Naslund. Hall of Fame inductions will also be given posthumously to Helen Keller, Zora Neale Hurston, Johnson Jones Hooper, Augusta Jane Evans Wilson, William March, Albert Murray, and Helen Norris Bell.
The event will take place at the Bryant Conference Center in Tuscaloosa beginning with a reception at 6 p.m. and continue with the dinner and induction ceremony at 7 p.m. A famously private woman who has shied from public appearances in the past, it is unknown if Lee will attend the ceremony.
The Alabama Writer’s Forum, The Alabama Center for the Book, and The University of Alabama Library Leadership Board are sponsors of the Alabama Writer’s Hall of Fame.
Lee’s second book, “Go Set a Watchman”, will be released nearly a month after her induction on July 14th. Watchmen, is set 20 years after Mockingbird and features the book’s main characters Scout and Atticus in the same fictional town of Maycomb, Alabama.
The book will be published by HarperCollins and with a first run of two million copies, both in print and e-book. To Kill a Mockingbird, originally published in July 1960, became available as an e-book for the first time last year. The author is from and currently resides in Monroeville, Alabama.
