First Sunday Prose

Join the Writers Guild at Bloomington as we learn about Indiana history with featured readers Sue Hyatt and Ed Fujawa on Sunday, September 6 at the Juniper Art Gallery at 4pm.  Both writers have worked on exciting projects in Indianapolis that tell us more about the people and places in our state.  Don’t miss it!

Dr. Susan Hyatt is Professor Emerita in Anthropology at Indiana University Indianapolis. Throughout her career, she has worked on issues such as urban poverty, social policy and community activism in the US and the UK. During the 1980s, before beginning her PhD at the University of Massachusetts, she worked for 8 years as a community organizer in southwest Chicago, collaborating with a range of grassroots organizations to address issues of local concern. She has involved her students in several neighborhood projects in Indianapolis, including The Neighborhood of Saturdays, a historical ethnography that tells the story of a community south of downtown where African American and Jewish immigrants lived side-by-side, sharing bonds of friendship and fellowship, during the first half of the 20th century. She has received several awards for teaching and civic engagement, including the Bantz Community Fellowship, which she shared with her late colleague, Dr. Paul Mullins. She also co-founded the Indiana chapter of the Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program, an innovative pedagogical approach tailored to facilitate dialogue across difference. These courses bring together campus-based students with incarcerated students and formerly incarcerated people who interact as peers, in a semester-long course held in a prison, jail or other settings. She retired in December 2023 after 19 years at IUI.

Ed Fujawa was born in Boulder, Colorado, but spent his formative years in Greenwood, Indiana and graduated from Greenwood Community High School. He then attended Indiana University – Bloomington and graduated in 2004 before leaving the state for law school.  Returning to Indiana in 2007, he and his wife Ashlee lived in downtown Indianapolis before moving to the Butler-Tarkington neighborhood in 2008.

Professionally, Ed is an attorney with the Indiana Department of Insurance, where he specializes in medical malpractice litigation.  In his spare time, he is also an Indianapolis historian and authors a blog dedicated to the history of the Indianapolis area, www.class900indy.com His first history book about the city, Vanished Indianapolis, was published in 2023 and explores the history of lost sites across Indianapolis. When he is not researching and exploring the history of Indianapolis and surrounding areas, Ed enjoys being a subpar fisherman, photography, and kayaking on the waterways of Indiana, including the White River and Fall Creek in Marion County.