ALEXIS DeVEAUX, PhD, Dept. of Women's Studies will deliver the 2006 Distinguished Faculty Lecture, "Geographies of Difference: 'Race,' Language, and Imagination," in the Screening Room of the Center for the Arts.

Dr. DeVeaux is an Associate Professor in the Department of Women’s Studies at the University at Buffalo. She is a poet, short fiction writer, essayist and biographer whose work is nationally and internationally known. Born and raised in Harlem, DeVeaux is published in five languages: English, Spanish, Dutch, Japanese and Serbo-Croatian. Her work has appeared in numerous anthologies and publications including Essence Magazine; Ms. Magazine; The Village Voice; Home Girls, A Black Feminist Anthology; Children of the Night, The Best Short Stories by Black Writers, 1967 to the Present; Afrekete, An Anthology of Black Lesbian Writing; Liberating Memory, Our Work and Working-Class Consciousness; and Midnight Birds, Stories by Contemporary Black Women Writers. Her books include a fictionalized memoir, Spirits In The Street (Doubleday, 1973); two award-winning children’s books, Na-ni (Harper and Row, 1973) and An Enchanted Hair Tale (Harper and Row, 1987); Don’t Explain, a biography of jazz great, Billie Holiday (Harper and Row, 1980); two independently published poetry works, Blue Heat: A Portfolio of Poems and Drawings (1985) and Spirit Talk (1997); and Warrior Poet, A Biography of Audre Lorde (W. W. Norton, 2004). The first biography of the late poet-activist, Warrior Poet has won several prestigious awards including the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Foundation Legacy Award (Nonfiction), 2005 and the Lambda Literary Foundation Award for Biography (2004).

The Gender Institute’s annual Distinguished Faculty Lecture offers work by outstanding scholars at the University at Buffalo that encourages new thinking about research on gender.