"Mourning Emmett" is an interweaving of because the process of mourning poetry, performance, and criticism that addresses the issue of how we, as a culture, mourn the atrocities of the past. I use the word "mourn" as opposed to "memorialize" because the process of mourning involves a much richer recognition of the person who has been lost and the historical and personal events surrounding that loss. Mourning allows for a continuous reliving rather than a finalizing moment of recognition. I believe that we must include the emotional and visceral response to an event woven together with the intellectual and theoretical response. Only by engaging the whole range of human reaction, do we reveal the empathetic as well as intellectual resonance of historical events. This kind of project becomes an argument for valuing the eye and voice of the artist as fully as the eye and voice of the historian and critic.

Rebecca Mark is a literary scholar whose articles, editions, and books, The Dragon's Blood: Feminist Intertextuality in Eudora Welty's Fiction and the Greenwood Encyclopedia of American Regional Cultures: The South, address southern writing and women's fiction, with a special focus on the work and life of Eudora Welty. She is currently completing two books: A Private Address is a study of the fiction of Eudora Welty; Ersatz America is about false histories and how and why the American cultural imagination holds on to and perpetuates these myths. She was a founding member of the Deep South Regional Humanities Center at Tulane and served as Director of Special Projects for two years. In 2005, she and Alferdteen Harrison from Jackson State University received the Public Humanities Achievement Award from the Mississippi Humanities Council for their work on the civil rights movement that took place in June 2004. She is currently the Interim Executive Director of the Newcomb College Institute.