GCCC Library to Host Author Iris Jamahl Dunkle on March 13th
[Garden City, KS] January 28, 2025 -- The Thomas Saffell Library at Garden City Community College (GCCC) will host author Iris Jamahl Dunkle for a special reading from her acclaimed novel Riding Like the Wind, which chronicles the extraordinary life of Sanora Babb, one of GCCC’s early alumna.
The event will be held on Thursday, March 13, at 5:00 PM at the Thomas Saffell Library, located at 801 Campus Drive, Garden City, KS. Admission is free, and everyone is welcome to attend. Guests will have the chance to meet the author, listen to excerpts from Riding Like the Wind, and explore Sanora Babb’s remarkable life and achievements. Copies of the book will be available for purchase, with an opportunity for signing.
Riding Like the Wind navigates Sanora Babb’s early life in poverty on a Broomcorn farm, her work in migrant camps during the Dust Bowl, her diary controversy with John Steinbeck (did he plagiarize her notes?) and the eventual recovery of her novel when it was lost to the prominence of his work, her experiences in Hollywood and as a newspaper reporter across the west, her forty year Los Angeles-based writing group with Ray Bradbury, her marriage to Academy Award winning cinematographer James Wong Howe before interracial marriage was legal, her passionate affair with Ralph Ellison and others (his biographer was missing letters from Babb's archives when writing and altered ideas about their actual relationship), and experiences as both a communist during the Red Scare and member of the first Writers Congress in 1935.
Riding Like the Wind has received widespread praise from literary giants and media outlets:
- PBS producer Ken Burns calls it “heartbreaking and heroic.”
- Bestselling author Kristen Hannah describes it as “long overdue recognition.”
- U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Hass hails Dunkle as a “brilliant and vivid storyteller.”
For more information, contact Julia Proctor, GCCC Director of Library Services, at julia.proctor@gcccks.edu.
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Garden City Community College exists to produce positive contributors to the economic and social well-being of society.
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