ISSUED: 11 March 2024
MEDIA CONTACT: Cecelia Mason
SHEPHERDSTOWN, WV — The Center for Appalachian Studies and Communities will host a conversation with writer Karen Spears Zacharias on Thursday, March 28, at 7 p.m. in the Robert C. Byrd Center for Congressional History and Education auditorium. The event is free and open to the public.
Zacharias’ newest novel “No Perfect Mothers” (Mercer University Press) tells the story of Carrie Buck, whose rights were argued in the 1927 U.S. Supreme Court case Buck v. Bell. Buck was a foster child who was fraudulently committed to the Virginia Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded and subsequently sterilized under Virginia’s eugenics program.
“‘No Perfect Mothers’ is a tale for our times,” said Dr. Sylvia Bailey Shurbutt, Appalachian studies center director. “The story of Carrie Buck’s infamous Supreme Court case changed the lives of women and began a sorrowful story of legislating women’s lives and claiming their bodies for the state.”
Karen Spears Zacharias is an American writer and the 2018 Shepherd University Appalachian Heritage Writer-in-Residence. Her work principally focuses on women and justice. She is a Weatherford award-winning fiction writer and a champion of the rights of all who are relegated as “other” or diminished by an indifferent patriarchy. Zacharias holds an M.A. in Appalachian studies from Shepherd and an M.A. in creative media practice from the University of the West of Scotland.
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