This year’s inaugural speaker, Baltimore native D. Watkins, is a celebrated author, social critic and editor-at-large at Salon. His speech will center on “Writing Baltimore: A Personal Journey of Lived Experience and Narrative Control.” Lawrence P. Jackson, Bloomberg Distinguished Professor and Director of the Billie Holiday Project, will host a conversation with D. Watkins following the lecture. Find out more about the event.

The Donald Bentley Memorial Lecture is the Billie Holiday Project’s capstone annual public event. It is a unique platform to drive debate and critical reflection on the role of the arts in our everyday lives and in our imagining of a future just world. This program honors the life of one of Baltimore’s promising young leaders who lost his life more than thirty years ago to Baltimore’s endemic violence crisis.