Shetterly's book, which will be released Tuesday, will also be adapted into a 20th Century Fox film of the same name that will hit theaters in early 2017. 'The history that came together in these pages wasn't so much hidden, but unseen - fragments patiently biding their time in footnotes, family anecdotes and musty folders before returning to view.'

'The title of this book is something of a misnomer,' Shetterly noted. In the 1940s, these female scientists and mathematicians were the human computers behind some of the biggest advancements in aeronautics. ' Hidden Figures,' Shetterly's first book, is the story of the nearly forgotten black women who worked at the Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia - the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's first field center, circa World War II. She may begin, before drifting into dreamland, to compute the distance her caregiver's love has to travel to reach the moon and then return to her.Īnd if author Margot Lee Shetterly has her way, when that little girl awakens from her slumber, she'll learn the names of the women who helped charter that journey. In the event of an overflow crowd, a live broadcast will be provided on campus.Somewhere tonight, a little girl will be tucked in and told that she is 'loved to the moon and back.' The book also profiles Christine Darden, who was the first African-American woman to be promoted into the Senior Executive Service for her work in researching supersonic flight and sonic booms. It was the basis of a film by the same name which was nominated for three Oscars. The book reached number one on The New York Times Non-Fiction Best Sellers list and got the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Nonfiction in 2017. Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Who Helped Win the Space Race is a 2016 non-fiction book that follows the lives of Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson, three mathematicians known as 'human computers' who overcame discrimination, as women and as African Americans, while working at NASA during the Space Race.

Hidden Figures has been named the 2018-19 Nashville Reads book by the Mayor's Office and the Nashville Public Library Foundation, as well as the Common Read by the Lipscomb University Light Program. The event is being held in celebration of Black History Month and National Engineering Week. The free lecture is open to the public and will be held in Collins Auditorium at 7:30 p.m.

Lipscomb University's Department of English and Modern Languages is pleased to present author Margot Lee Shetterly, author of Hidden Figures, as the annual Landiss Lecture speaker.

Hidden figures by margot lee shetterly