WINSTON-SALEM — The popular Lecture Night in Camel City series will return this summer to Bookmarks beginning with Dr. Julia Skinner on Saturday, May 25 at 6:30 p.m.

The remaining lectures will take place at 7 p.m. on June 8 and 22, July 6 and 20, and Aug. 3 and 17.  All the lectures are free and open to the public and will be held at the Bookmarks bookstore at 634 W. Fourth Street No. 110 in downtown Winston-Salem.

Skinner, author of “Afternoon Tea: A History,” will explore the history of English tea, complete with traditional snacks. Skinner is the founder and director of Root, a food history and fermentation organization in Atlanta, Georgia. She also works as a professional fermenter and has extensive experience as a food history researcher.

On Saturday, June 8 at 7 p.m., National Humanities Award-winning historian Jacqueline Dowd Hall will speak about the Lumpkin sisters, descendants of a prominent slaveholding family who were “estranged and yet forever entangled.”

Hall is the author of “Sisters and Rebels: A Struggle for the Soul of America,” which is grounded in decades of research, the Lumpkin family’s private papers, and interviews with Katharine and Grace Lumpkin, who reinvented themselves as radical thinkers and activists.

On Saturday, June 22 at 7 p.m., Spring-Serenity Duvall, chair of the communication and media studies department at Salem College, will discuss contemporary celebrity culture with an emphasis on how young celebrities are manufactured, how fan communities are cultivated, and how young audiences consume and aspire to fame. Duvall is the author of the new book “Celebrity and Youth: Mediated Audiences, Fame Aspirations, and Identity Formation.”

Lecture Night in Camel City began in 2006 when Raef Byers and Wes Schollander decided to change their bi-monthly poker game to a “lecture night.” It has since been hosted annually between Memorial Day and Labor Day. The speakers are volunteers who research and present a topic of interest, followed by a discussion and Q&A.

Over the years, topics have ranged wildly, including book collecting, the color spectrum and punk rock. In 2018, Lecture Night moved to Bookmarks to expand and involve the entire community. The success of that partnership has led Lecture Night to once again appear at Bookmarks in 2019.

Bookmarks is a literary arts nonprofit organization whose mission is to ignite the love of reading by connecting the community with books and authors. Its 15th book festival will be held Sept. 5-8.