Michelle Alexander will appear as the keynote speaker on Friday, January 20, at the annual Martin Luther King Jr. Dinner at 5 p.m. in the Brown Ballroom of the Bone Student Center.

The ISU student chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the ISU President’s Office are sponsoring the dinner, which will be provided by Campus Dining Services. Tickets are available for students for $15 and for non-students for $35.

“Each year, representatives from both areas get together and discuss who might be a good speaker for that particular year,” Jay Groves, university spokesperson, said.

Past speakers have included Martin Luther King III, CNN’s Soledad O’Brien and actor Danny Glover.

Alexander is a civil rights lawyer, advocate and legal scholar and, according to the Keppler Speakers website, Alexander holds positions at the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity and the Moritz College of Law at Ohio State University.

Alexander’s focus of study and research, as well as her focus in litigation, is on civil rights.

Much of her work in the legal field focuses on civil rights advocacy and litigation in both private and public sectors, according to her page on the Moritz College of Law website. She specialized in cases alleging racial and gender discrimination.

Alexander’s book, “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness,” was named by the NAACP as one of the top African American books of 2010. The NAACP also awarded her book the 2010 Image Award for “outstanding literary work of non-fiction.”

“Michelle Alexander is breaking the silence about racial injustice in the American legal system,” the Moritz website stated. “She explores the cultural biases that still exist and how segregation has been replaced by mass incarceration.”

Alexander will speak on the current problems with the United States legal system, discrimination against African American citizens and solutions to some of these problems.