"Sacred Spaces: The Penn Center, Belief and Belonging," a public conversation presented by Culture and Community at the Penn Center National Historic Landmark District, a partnership initiative of Penn Center and the University of Georgia Willson Center for Humanities and Arts, funded by a grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

The conversation will explore the spaces where creative power, cultural heritage memories, and practices treated with reverence exist.

Panelists will include artist and storyteller Natalie Daise; Griffin Lotson, manager of the Gullah Geechee Ring Shouters; and artist and activist Charmaine Minniefield. Dr. Valerie Babb, Andrew Mellon Professor of the Humanities in the departments of African American Studies and English at Emory University, will moderate the discussion.

Melissa L. Cooper, associate professor of history at Rutgers University-Newark and author of Making Gullah: A History of Sapelo Islanders, Race, and the American Imagination, will provide remarks by video to be posted on this site soon.

A community dinner will be held at 7 p.m. after the panel discussion, followed by Charmaine Minniefield's on-site projected installation, "The Praise House Project: Remembrance as Resistance, Preserving Black Narratives" at 8:30 p.m.

This event is part of the Global Georgia Initiative public events series of the Willson Center. The conversation will be video recorded and shared publicly at a later date for those who cannot attend in person.