Pulitzer Prize-winning and best-selling author Taylor Branch will speak at DePaul at 6 p.m. Feb.7 in Room 154 of the Schmitt Academic Center, 2320 N. Kenmore Ave.

Branch’s recently released third tome in the trilogy on the civil rights movement, “Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-68” (Simon & Schuster), will form the basis for his talk. He will sign books immediately following his lecture. Branch’s lecture and book signing are free and open to the public.

The first and second books of Branch’s series, “Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-63,” for which the author won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and “Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years 1963-65,” were both New York Times’ bestsellers. The earlier books traced the movement and Martin L. King Jr. from the Montgomery bus boycott to the March on Washington, and from the Mississippi Freedom Summer and the murder of civil rights workers to King being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. “Canaan’s Edge” chronicles King’s efforts to hold his movement together in the face of bitter controversy generated by his stance against the Vietnam War, the failed attempt to have the freedom movement spread north, and King’s final campaign for economic justice for a group of striking sanitation workers in Memphis.

For more information about Branch’s visit to DePaul, contact the Office of Student Affairs, sponsor of the event, at 312/362-5680.