Curveball with Author Martha Ackmann

Memorial Hall Library, 2 N Main St, Andover, MA | Get Directions »
FREE

Curveball tells the inspiring story of baseball's "female Jackie Robinson," a woman whose ambition, courage and raw talent propelled her from the ragtag teams barnstorming the Dakotas to the hallowed ground of Yankee Stadium.  Toni Stone was the first woman to play professional baseball in the Negro League.  She played against Ernie Banks, Willie Mays, Buck O'Neil, and Satchel Paige--and let her talent speak for –itself.  Curveball chronicles Stone's remarkable career facing down not only fastballs, but jeers, sabotage, and Jim Crow America as well.  Her story reveals how far passion, pride, and determination can take one person in pursuit of a dream.

Martha Ackmann is a journalist and author who writes about women who have changed America.  Ackmann is also the author of The Mercury 13: The True Story of Thirteen Women and the Dream of Space Flight.  A recipient of a John S. Guggenheim Fellowship, Ackmann is the former Augustus Anson Whitney Scholar in Non-Fiction at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.  She teaches in the Gender Studies Department at Mount Holyoke College where she is at work on a new book about poet Emily Dickinson.

Sponsored by the Friends of Memorial Hall Library.