Curly Kid at Twisted Curlz reminds me that I should make sure to write about the upcoming Loving Decision Conference, celebrating the 40th anniversary of the Supreme Court's decision to strike down anti-miscegenation laws. It's hard to imagine that just forty years ago it was illegal in many states for whites and blacks to marry. My parents faced this legal hurdle when they met and, in fact, married in Denmark rather than in the United States. (My father's next assignment was a South Carolina Air Force base. South Carolina still had anti-miscegenation laws. As the family lore goes, when the military found out he had married a white woman, they transferred him to Tacoma instead.)
The Loving Decision Conference will be an amazing event. There are dozens of panels concerning transracial adoption, the issues of blended families, and biracial and multiracial identity. I will moderate a panel titled The Creole Aesthetic: Biracial Identity in the Arts. It's a cross disciplinary panel with filmmaker Octavio Warnock-Graham, photographer Mica Anders, and Arana Fossett, founder of the Topaz Club and jewelry artist. I'll also present a short piece at the Friday night extravaganza (possibly from my one-woman show in development about me and Nella Larsen) and on Saturday afternoon I'll do a longer reading from Light-skinned-ed Girl, my novel manuscript, and share new writing from a novel-in-progress about Miss Lala, the mulatta strongwoman immortalized by Edgar Degas in his painting, Miss Lala at Le Cirque Fernando. 
(You can read more about Miss Lala at my website.)
If you can make it to the Conference, please do. Let's have coffee!
