New York Times best-selling author Michelle Alexander will be the first speaker of the spring 2018 season of the Old Dominion University President's Lecture Series.

The President's Lecture Series serves as a marketplace for ideas, featuring fascinating personalities who share their knowledge, experience, opinions and accomplishments. Discussing timely topics, the series puts diversity first, showcasing authors, educators, business innovators and political figures. The lectures are free and open to the public.

Alexander will deliver the President's Task Force on Inclusive Excellence and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Observance Lecture on Jan. 16. The lecture will take place at 7:00 p.m. in the Ted Constant Convocation Center.

Alexander offers powerful insights on mass incarceration in the United States, as well as eye-opening conversation on how we can end the racial caste system in America.

In her acclaimed best-seller, "The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness," Alexander pulls back the curtain on systemic racism in the American prison system. The New York Review of Books said the book is "striking in the intelligence of her ideas, her powers of summary and the force of her writing."

Alexander, a legal scholar, social justice advocate and visiting professor at Union Theological Seminary in New York, employs equal force on stage to call for a multi-racial, multi-ethnic human rights movement for justice in America.

The Village Bookstore on Monarch Way will have books available for sale with a signing to follow the lecture.