The public is invited to the annual Stephen Ambrose Memorial Lecture featuring Jamie Ford on Tuesday, October 23, 2018 at 6:30 p.m. “Racebending: Adventures in a Bi-cultural World” will be presented in the sanctuary of St. Paul’s Methodist Church in Helena. This lecture is funded in part by a grant from Humanities Montana, an affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

The annual lecture, presented by the Lewis & Clark Library Foundation, is part of the Speaking Volumes Transforming Hate series of events co-sponsored by the Montana Human Rights Network, Holter Museum of Art, YWCA, and other organizations, from September 14 to December 30, 2018.

Jamie Ford is the great grandson of Nevada mining pioneer Min Chung, who emigrated from Kaiping, China, to San Francisco in 1865. Ford’s lecture on “racebending” will touch on an early example of cultural appropriation and assimilation when his great-grandfather changed his name from Min Chung to William Ford and the generational ripple effect that had on his family. He’ll also talk about what the future might hold as we approach 2045, the year the Brookings Institute predicts people of color will become the ethnic majority in the US. He’ll discuss why finding the truth in historical fiction is so important and how he came to write about subjects so close to his personal past and future.

Ford’s first novel, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet (2009), was awarded the Asian Pacific American Award for Literature and was on the New York Times bestseller list for more than two years. Ford’s second novel, Songs of Willow Frost (2013), was also a New York Times best-seller. His latest work, Love and Other Consolation Prizes (2017), is inspired by the true and touching story of a young orphan boy from China who was raffled off as a prize at the 1909 Seattle World’s Fair.

Ford earned a degree in design from the Art Institute of Seattle and also attended Seattle’s School of Visual Concepts. He is an alumnus of the Squaw Valley Community of Writers and of Orson Scott Card’s Literary Boot Camp. Having grown up near Seattle’s Chinatown, he now lives in Montana with his wife and children.

Book signing will follow the lecture.