Beginning on Wednesday, February 7, 2024 and running for six consecutive weeks, PhD candidate Deanna Witkowski will be teaching an online course for Jazz at Lincoln Center. Registration for her course, "The Music of Mary Lou Williams.", can be found here.

Deanna's award winning book, Mary Lou Williams: Music for the Soul, brings a fresh perspective to the life and music of the legendary jazz pianist-composer Mary Lou Williams (1910-81). As a fellow jazz pianist-composer, adult convert to Catholicism, and liturgical composer, Witkowski offers unique insight gleaned from a twenty-year journey with Williams as her chosen musical and spiritual mentor. Viewing Williams’s musical and corporal acts of mercy as part of a singular effort to create community no matter the context, Witkowski examines how Williams created networks of support and friendship through her decades long letter correspondence with various women religious, her charitable work, and her tireless efforts to perform jazz in churches, community centers, concert halls, and schools. Throughout this fascinating story told with equal amounts of deep love and scholarly research, Witkowski illumines Williams’s passionate mantra that “jazz is healing to the soul.” (https://www.litpress.org)