The 2025 Little Berks will be held in Evanston, Illinois at the Hilton Orrington Hotel from May 29-June 1,2025. On Wednesday through Friday afternoon, the program committee for the 2026 Big Berks will meet and then members of the Berks will join Friday afternoon for a weekend of friendship, scholarship and connection.
Our weekend will include two amazing evening talks.
Friday evening we will hear from Jennifer Brier and Debra Fleming about their work on “Towards a Living Women’s History of HIV/AIDS.”
Debra Fleming: Since leaving Dwight Correctional Penitentiary in 1999 with my only piece of “formal” education, my GED under my belt. I set out to change my life!
As a former Intravenous Drug User sober was first, then stable housing. The year 2000 came with insight and need. Insight into who I was to become a fierce community advocate that was sorely needed.
I joined the Westside HIV/AIDS Regional Planning Group my intro into the struggle. From there I went on to become:
- Community Co – Chair Chicago HIV Prevention Planning Group
- Community Co – Chair Chicago Ryan White Title 1 Services
- Amnesty International Speaker
- National HIV/AIDS Housing Coalition Board Member
- Prevention Case Manager, Haymarket Center
- Community Co- Chair Urban Coalition For HIV Prevention Services
- Red Ribbon Trails Community Advisory Board
- Assistant Director House Of James HIV Housing Program
I’ve survived four epidemics, chronic homelessness, drug addiction, really bad Presidential decisions, and thirty -two years of living with HIV/AIDS. Yet, this is just a small part of who I am.
Jennifer Brier is professor of Gender & Women’s Studies and History at UIC. She is author of Infectious Ideas: U.S. Political Response to the AIDS Crisis (UNC, 2009) and has curated numerous historical exhibitions, including Out in Chicago, for the Chicago History Museum, and “I’m Still Surviving,” www.stillsurviving.net, a transmedia living women’s history of HIV/AIDS.
Saturday evening we will hear from Jeanne Theoharis about her new book King of the North, a biography of Martin Luther King, Jr.
Jeanne Theoharis is the author or co-author of thirteen books and numerous articles on the civil rights and Black Power movements and the contemporary politics of race in the United States. Her new book (coming out March 25, 2025) is King of the North: Martin Luther King Jr’s. Life of Struggle Outside the South. Her biography The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks won a 2014 NAACP Image Award and the Letitia Woods Brown Award from the Association of Black Women Historians. The book was turned into a documentary directed by Johanna Hamilton and Yoruba Richen and executive produced by Soledad O’Brien now streaming on Peacock where she served as a consulting producer. The documentary was awarded a 2023 Peabody Award and a Television Academy Honor Award. Her book A More Beautiful and Terrible History: The Uses and Misuses of Civil Rights History won the 2018 Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize for Nonfiction. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, MSNBC, The Nation, The Atlantic, The Intercept, Boston Review, and The Chronicle of Higher Education.
