Visiting Professor Ezra Greenspan at Chestertown’s Book Plate

The back room of the Book Plate in Chestertown was full to listen to visiting professor Ezra Greenspan, author of “William Wells Brown: An African American Life”, read from his work-in-progress biography on Frederick Douglass’ family as a part of the Chestertown Art Crawl on the afternoon of February 22, 2020.

Usually when an author does a book talk it’s to sell a book. But Professor Greenspan said at the beginning of his talk, ‘There is no book’. He told the audience that there is still much work to be done with around 125 book pages completed.

Ezra Greenspan is the 2019-2020 Patrick Henry Writing Fellow at Washington College’s Starr Center. He is working on a multigenerational family biography titled Frederick Douglass’ People: A Family Biography that recounts the life of Frederick Douglass in relation to the lives of his relatives—ancestors, siblings, cousins, wives, children, and grandchildren.

He read two of his completed passages about the two families, the slave owning Anthony family and the Bailey family, Frederick Douglass’ brother, cousins and other family members.