Mrs. Annyce Campbell, 88, of Mound Bayou, is one of the 50 women featured in the book, “Jewels in the Delta.” Photo: Alysia Steele.
Photography professor Alysia Steele’s “Jewels in the Delta,” a book of photography focusing on black women from the Delta, will be showcased at 5 p.m. Thursday in the Overby Center.
Steele spent nine months in the Delta searching for women to feature in the book. The book features 50 women with photographs and accompanying stories of their lives in the Mississippi Delta.
Bill Rose, professor of journalism and colleague of Steele, expressed his thoughts on the event.
“’Jewels in the Delta’ is going to be a marvelous book because it is about these veteran Delta church women – almost all of whom are members of the Mother Board of Missionary Baptist churches in the Delta. It is a blissful marriage of words and images by a very talented photographer,” Rose said.
There are many things that make this book worth picking up, according to Rose.
“What makes ‘Jewels in the Delta’ so good is the quality of the photographs and the stories Alysia Steele has gotten out of these women,” Rose said. “They all have interesting stories about the lessons of life as role models in their churches and communities.”
The book features stories on voting, race, marriage and childbirth and lessons on how to live a good life.
Rose spoke of the impact faith had on the lives of these women.
“Faith is very important to black people in the Delta. They came from a life of oppression and they fought through it with the help of their faith,” Rose said. “Faith played a major role in helping them to bear enormous stress and discrimination. ‘Jewels in the Delta’ is so good because she captures all of that.”
Although Steele is on the road right now interviewing more women, she made time to express her reasons for deciding to produce her work.
“I decided to do this book for personal reasons,” Steele said. “It is dedicated in the honor of my grandmother, Althenia A. Burton, the woman who raised me.”
Steele went on to speak of her grandmother’s influence on her life and her book.
“When you’re young, you think you will live forever, and you think your loved ones will too,” she said. “This year marks the 20th anniversary of her death, and she’s been heavily on my mind. I will never hear her voice again, but what I can do is capture other people’s grandmothers’ voices and tell their stories — and that’s what I’ve set it to do.”
Steele is an accomplished journalist and was a member of the team that won the Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Photography in 2006 for Hurricane Katrina coverage. She has worked as a photo editor for the Dallas Morning News and deputy director of photography and photo editor at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Mary Chandler Cossar, sophomore public policy major, expressed her anticipation for the upcoming event.
“I am looking forward to attending the event and seeing the work of Professor Steele,” she said. “I have always enjoyed photography and am excited to see these moving and inspiring images and stories.”
— Mary Virginia Portera
mvporter@go.olemiss.edu
