Award-winning author to lecture about Blind Tom

An award-winning author will be in town Tuesday to give a free lecture about the local slave who became an internationally known entertainer.

Jeffery Renard Allen's presentation, "Rediscovering Blind Tom: Georgia's Forgotten Musical Genius," is scheduled to start at 6:30 p.m. in the Columbus Public Library, 3000 Macon Road.

The event is part of the Rothschild Speaker Series, based out of the Columbus Museum, where an archive of artifacts related to Thomas "Blind Tom" Wiggins is in the exhibition "Once Collected, Always Cherished: Highlights from the George Greene and J. Kyle Spencer Collections," on display through Jan. 10.

Wiggins was born blind on a Columbus area plantation in the 1840s. He had what a modern diagnosis would call autism, but he also was considered a savant. He became a prodigy pianist and by age 6 was performing for sellout crowds, according to Deirdre O'Connell's 2009 biography, "The Ballad of Blind Tom." He took on the stage name Blind Tom, composed more than 1,000 pieces of original music and was the first African American to perform in the White House when he played for President James Buchanan in 1860.

During his lecture, Allen will explore topics from his novel "Song of the Shank," which features the historical figure Blind Tom. According to the museum's news release, the novel ranges from Blind Tom's boyhood to the heights of his career "as Allen blends history and fantastical invention."

Allen is a faculty member in the creative writing program at The New School in New York. "Song of the Shank" (Graywolf Press, 2014) is a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. He was awarded a 2015 Guggenheim Fellowship.

Allen's other novel, "Rails Under My Back" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000), won the Chicago Tribune's Heartland Prize for Fiction. His story collection, "Holding Pattern" (Graywolf Press, 2008), won the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence. He also has written two collections of poetry, "Stellar Places" (Moyer Bell, 2007) and "Harbors and Spirits" (Moyer Bell, 1999).

Mark Rice, 706-576-6272. Follow him on Twitter@MarkRiceLE.

This story was originally published October 2, 2015 at 3:15 PM with the headline "Award-winning author to lecture about Blind Tom ."