Timothy Tyson, prize-winning author of “Blood Done Sign My Name,” will bring southern history to a Midwestern audience at 7 p.m., Friday, Oct. 26, in Room C20 at the University of Iowa Pomerantz Career Center.

Tyson’s book was selected for the 2007 “One Community, One Book” project by the UI Center for Human Rights (UICHR). Gospel singer Mary Williams, a native of Raleigh, N.C., will join Tyson in a presentation of songs from the book.

The community-wide reading project, now in its seventh year, highlights a chosen literary work and strives to broaden and foster an understanding of human rights through reading. Tyson’s book, published by Random House in 2004, won the Southern Book Award for Nonfiction.

Tyson’s memoir explores the subject of human rights in rich detail as he delves more than 30 years into his childhood memories to tell the true-life story of Henry Marrow, a 23-year-old black U.S. Army veteran, murdered in Oxford, N.C., in 1973.

“The book was chosen because it is well-written and very timely,” said Joan Nashelsky, co-coordinator of the program. “Written from the vantage point of a 10-year old child, these events really changed the author’s life.”

The events in Oxford spanned much of Tyson’s life, later becoming part of his professional career, first as his graduate thesis topic and later his book, which he wrote while a professor in the Afro-American studies department at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, Nashelsky said.

Tyson is a senior research scholar at the History Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, visiting professor of American Christianity and southern culture at Duke Divinity School, and an adjunct professor of history and of American studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

For more information, visit the UICHR Web site at http://www.uichr.org where discussion notes and questions are posted. For special accommodations to attend the event, contact Nashelsky at 319-335-3900 or joan-nashelsky@uiowa.edu.