By Megan Finnerty
Asst. Campus Editor

With a subtle accent that bubbles to the conversation's surface, Patricia Powell, Harvard University's Briggs-Copeland Lecturer in Fiction, makes audiences want to listen as long as she'll keep talking.

And talking is what she will be doing at 7 tonight in the Union's Lafayette Room.

Powell, the first speaker in the Women Writers Series sponsored by African American Studies and Research Center and Purdue Libraries, was born and lived in Jamaica until 1982, giving her a tone of voice that is as soothing as the issues that she will be discussing are arousing.

"The Pagoda," Powell's third publication and winner of the Publishing Triangle's 1999 Ferro-Grumley Award, is set in her native land and tells the story of a Chinese woman's life in the early 19th century as she cross dresses as a man in order to immigrate to Jamaica.

"It is about a Chinese woman who lives as a male shopkeeper and passes, but it also deals with class, race, history, sexuality and how all those different social situations are constantly interacting," Powell said.

Although there are many Chinese who live in Jamaica, Powell said there is little written about them and their history and that is what sparked her interest in writing about a Chinese character. The cross dressing, however, came as a surprise.

"In my research, I found that Chinese women were not allowed to leave the country during the time in which I wanted to set the novel but I knew I wanted a female protagonist," said Powell. "So in order to keep it historically correct, I made her cross dress."

Powell's other novels, "Me Dying Trial" and "A Small Gathering of Bones," also deal with overarching social issues and realities. The former was her senior thesis and is a coming-of-age story about the relationship between a mother and her daughter. The latter is about a group of gay men in Jamaica dealing with AIDS in the '70s; Powell describes it as a book about how people handle grief.

During the Inaugural Harriet A. Jacobs Lecture in the Humanities and Arts, Powell will be describing much more than just her books. She will talk about her experiences as a writer, the themes she enjoys exploring in her writing and the writing process as she has come to be a part of it.

Emily Mobley, dean of libraries, was supportive of and enthusiastic about the series because she said she enjoys the idea of having world authors come to campus who are doing new types of literature.

"So often people think of books written by predominantly white men as being the most important works," she said. "And I think that shows the engrained traditions of European thought; we wanted to bring writers with experiences outside of the traditional."