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Alamance County Public Libraries’s Alamance Reads, Power+Place Collaborative and ���ϲ�����’s Center for Design Thinking are inviting the ���ϲ����� and Alamance community to have lunch and sit down to discuss themes of leadership and changemaking from The American Queen with the book’s author Venessa Miller.

In preparation, students from the Center for Design Thinking have been working alongside Power + Place storytellers to mentor youth in Robert Alvis’ Civic Literacy course at Walter Williams High School.

In addition, students from Professor Deidre Yancey’s “Leadership Theories” class have been preparing to facilitate conversations around leadership and changemaking for community attendees.

The American Queen is a North Carolina Reads 2025 pick from the North Carolina Humanities NC Center. The book is based on the true story of Louella and William Montgomery, two freed slaves who became the self-proclaimed king and queen of the Kingdom of Happy Land nestled in the Blue Ridge Mountains of western NC.

Alamance Reads is funded by the Friends of the Alamance County Public Libraries, a nonprofit that raises money through annual book sales to support all programming initiatives, including the Zoom Pass program, the Lucky Day collection, the Seed Library, book club kits, educational resource kits and downloadable electronic content.

To help make these connections possible, the Center for Design Thinking and the Power+Place Collaborative were awarded $20,000 from the North Carolina Humanities Awards Large Project Grant. The grant, entitled “Storying Home: Cultivating Cross-Cultural Connections through Storytelling,” supports civic storytelling efforts across the county. The goals are to connect people to different ideas in their local communities and encourage a deeper understanding of the importance of conversation between different generations and backgrounds.