Facebook Book Club #1: Solitary by Albert Woodfox

Book Discussion

Facebook Book Club #1: Reading Solitary by Albert Woodfox

June 2, 2020 to June 30, 2020

The Stowe Center will create a Facebook group for audiences to read and discuss the 2020 Stowe Literary Prize winner, Solitary, by Albert Woodfox.

This moderated group will be led by Amy Hufnagel, Director of Programs, and will include posts by various invited guests. Participants can check in and out as their schedule allow. Join the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center Facebook page to participate.

A finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction and 2019 National Book Award, Solitary is the life story of a man who served more than four decades in solitary confinement―in a 6-foot by 9-foot cell, 23 hours a day, in notorious Angola prison in Louisiana―all for a crime he did not commit.

“Woodfox’s shocking memoir of his years in prison, mostly under solitary confinement, is a testament to the human spirit and a scathing indictment of the justice system … Woodfox’s story reads like a prison diary and is unrelenting in its portrait of the day-to-day humiliations and racism experienced by Black prisoners … Woodfox’s difficult story is a call to action for justice-system reform.”

~Kathy Sexton, Booklist

Location Stowe Prize Book Club

Doors Open Online

Program 24/7

School Group Interest Form

School Group Interest Form 2024

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Adult Group Interest Form

Group Tour Interest Form 2022

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Isabella Beecher Hooker

Isabella Holmes Beecher Hooker (1822-1907)
An ardent member of the woman’s suffrage movement, Isabella Holmes Beecher Hooker joined in the cause along with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony.

Isabella was the first child of Lyman Beecher and his second wife, Harriet Porter Beecher.

Isabella began her education at Catharine Beecher’s Hartford Female Seminary and lived with her sister Mary Perkins. In 1841 she married John Hooker, a descendant of Thomas Hooker, the founder of Hartford. John Hooker was a lawyer and an abolitionist.

In the early 1860s Isabella got involved in the woman’s suffrage movement. Isabella joined Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony as a member of the National Woman’s Suffrage Association in 1869. She was a founding member of the Connecticut Woman’s Suffrage Association. Isabella’s ideas of equality were influenced by John Stuart Mills’ On Liberty and the Subjection of Women.

In 1871, Isabella organized the annual convention of the National Woman’s Suffrage Association in Washington D.C. and presented her argument before the Committee on the Judiciary of the United States Senate. Her husband, John Hooker, believed in his wife and supported her activities. He helped Isabella draft a bill to the Connecticut Legislature giving married women the same property rights as their husbands. The bill passed in 1877. Isabella annually submitted a bill granting women the right to vote, but it did not pass in her lifetime.