LEWISTON – Award-winning writer Alake Pilgrim, a member of the Bates College class of 2003, will give a first-person talk, “Who Am I? Identity Issues of Mammoths, Humans and Christ” for the Bates Christian Fellowship Wednesday, May 17. The lecture will begin at 7 p.m. in Hirasawa Lounge, Chase Hall, 56 Campus Ave. She will also read from her work at 7 p.m. Thursday, May 18, in the Benjamin Mays Center.

The events are open to the public free of charge. For more information, call 786-8294.

Pilgrim’s reading will be followed by the showing of Trinidadian director Asha Lovelace’s two-hour critically acclaimed film, “Joebell and America,” the tale of a young man from Trinidad who attempts to immigrate illegally to the United States. “The film juxtaposes interestingly with my stories,” Pilgrim said.

“I grew up in Trinidad and Tobago embedded in the shared fragments of the Caribbean’s multicultural reality,” Pilgrim wrote.

After teaching at her former high school for one year, in 1999, she received a scholarship to attend Bates College, where she studied political theory, anthropology and women’s studies.

Professor of English Carole Taylor, who taught Pilgrim at Bates, describes Pilgrim’s prize-winning stories as eloquent. “Mangoes to Buy” and “Peppersauce” work, Taylor said, “because of compelling characters who speak in a rich vernacular, an intense authorial lyricism and the insights of a mature writer about cultural belonging and displacement.”