DAVID CECELSKI: BRIEF BIOGRAPHY
Historian and writer David Cecelski is the author of several award-winning books and hundreds
of articles about history, race, and culture in the American South. His next book, The Fire of Freedom:
Abraham Galloway and the Slaves’ Civil War, will be published in the spring of 2012. His previous
books include The Waterman’s Song: Slavery and Freedom in Maritime North Carolina (University of
North Carolina Press, 2001) and a collection of environmental history essays titled A Historian’s Coast.
He was also the editor, with Timothy B. Tyson, of Democracy Betrayed: The Wilmington Race Riot of
1898 and Its Legacy, which won an Outstanding Book Award from the Gustavis Myers Center for the
Study of Human Rights. His first book, Along Freedom Road: Hyde County, North Carolina, and the
Fate of Black Schools in the South, continues to be a central text in the field, and he also co-edited (with
Katherine Mellen Charron) an important slave narrative, William Henry Singleton’s Recollections of My
Slavery Days. For five years, Dr. Cecelski contributed a regular environmental history essay to
Coastwatch magazine, and his popular oral history series, “Listening to History,” recently ended a tenyear run in the Raleigh News & Observer. Dr. Cecelski has held several distinguished visiting
professorships, including three stints as the Lehman Brady joint chair in Documentary and American
Studies at Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and another as the
Whichard Distinguished Chair in the Humanities at East Carolina University. Educated at Duke and
Harvard, he is married to Dr. Laura Hanson, and they have two children, Vera and Guy. A native of the
North Carolina coast, his writing has focused passionately on telling stories from his native land that
illuminate American history more broadly.