SAVANNAH, Ga. 2025 — The Flannery O’Connor Childhood Home, held a panel, “Flannery O’Connor: Faith, Race, and Disability,” at the Beach Institute in Savannah to discuss the three subjects in Flannery O’Connor’s work.

Panelists included:

• Angela Alaimo O’Donnell, a writer, poet, and professor at Fordham University in New York City where she teaches English, Creative Writing, and American Catholic Studies. She also serves as Associate Director of the Curran Center for American Catholic Studies. Her critical work includes the book “Radical Ambivalence: Race in Flannery O’Connor” (Fordham University Press, 2020), and she has also authored several volumes of poetry.
• Mark Bosco, a Jesuit priest and Georgetown University professor of literature who writes about the intersection of religion and literature. His areas of research and specialization are in the fields of 20th-Century American and British Literature, the Roman Catholic literary tradition, aesthetics, art, and the religious imagination. He is also the co-writer and co-director of the documentary “Flannery: The Storied Life of the Writer from Georgia.”
• Patricia West, a retired Savannah State University professor and author of many articles about teaching, American literature, and Flannery O’Connor. Her book, “Still Water Words: Poems and Stories from Ancestral Places,” is inspired by her Gullah-Geechee heritage. Her current project explores the lives of the Black farm workers at Andalusia thought to have inspired the creation of O’Connor’s African American characters.

There was a packed house and attendees were able to ask the panelists questions about O’Connor. A reception followed.