Please join us for a History Break with Anderson Center Artist-In-Residence Sonia Beltz!
How do you discover a history that has been buried? Belva Lockwood was a 19th-century suffragist, a two-time presidential candidate, and the first female lawyer admitted to the bar of the United States Supreme Court. But when she left her home behind to pursue destiny, she did so with little remember of the Western New York landscape that raised her. Nearly two centuries later, I discovered Belva as a lonely, homesick college student and embarked on a quest to uncover the secrets and sensations of Belva’s oft-forgotten childhood. In this presentation, I’ll discuss the process of discovering and researching this seminal but overlooked figure of American history and how this work intersects with my own childhood experiences.
About Sonia: Sonia Beltz is a writer from Lockport, New York. She is a graduate of the University of Minnesota’s MFA in Creative Writing, where she recently defended her thesis in creative nonfiction; in the fall, Sonia will begin a PhD in early modern literature at Loyola University Chicago. Her work centers themes of history, place, and identity set across the backdrop of the Western New York landscape she once called home. She currently lives in Minneapolis, and can usually be found deep in a niche historical wormhole.
