08/23/2023
We are excited to announce the 2023-2024 University Speaker Series Season!
We kick off this year’s season with Emily St. John Mandel on September 12th. She is the author of many novels, including "The Glass Hotel," "Station Eleven," and "Sea of Tranquility." Her novel "Station Eleven," which was a finalist for a National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award, won the 2015 Arthur C. Clarke Award, the Toronto Book Award, and the Morning News Tournament of Books, and was adapted into a limited series for HBO.
Next up is Billy Collins on November 28th, a Poet Laureate, and a poet phenomenon. His newest book of poetry is "Musical Tables." Paul Simon said on Collins’ latest work, “The poetry of Billy Collins has a kindness that glitters with hard truth, and in Musical Tables he gives us a book of short, witty, often luminous snapshots of our sad and funny world.” Billy Collins has published twelve collections of poetry, including "Questions About Angels," "The Art of Drowning," "Sailing Alone Around the Room: New & Selected Poems," "Nine Horses," "The Trouble with Poetry and Other Poems," "Ballistics," "Horoscopes for the Dead," and "Picnic."
Kicking off Black History Month is Imani Perry on February 1st. Perry’s work reflects the deeply complex history of Black thought, art, and imagination. It is also formed by her background as a legal historian and her understanding of the racial inequality embedded in American law. Her latest book, National Book Award-winner "South to America: A Journey Below the Mason Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation", is a narrative journey through the American South, positioning it as the heart of the American experiment for better and worse. In looking at the South through a historic, personal, and anecdotal lens, Perry asserts that if we do indeed want to build a more humane future for the United States, we must center our concern below the Mason-Dixon Line. A “rich and imaginative tour of a crucial piece of America” (Publishers Weekly), South by America defies classification.
Wrapping up the season is Bob Woodruff on March 19th, part of the Jamal Khashoggi Annual Address on Journalism and the Media. Since returning to the air, Woodruff has reported from around the globe—North Korea on the country's denuclearization process, Syria, and Jordan on the exodus of Iraqi refugees in those countries, and from war-torn Sudan. On January 29, 2006, while reporting on U.S. and Iraqi security forces, Woodruff was seriously injured by a roadside bomb that struck his vehicle near Taji, Iraq. In February 2007, just 13 months after being wounded in Iraq, Woodruff returned to ABC News with his first on-air report, “To Iraq and Back: Bob Woodruff Reports”. The hour-long, primetime documentary chronicled his traumatic brain injury (TBI), his painstaking recovery and the plight of thousands of service members returning from Iraq and Afghanistan with similar injuries. Woodruff continues to cover traumatic brain injuries for all ABC News broadcasts and platforms and was honored with a “Peabody Award” in 2008 for his reporting on the subject.
Each of the Speaker Series events will begin at 7:00 p.m. in Tilson Auditorium. For more information visit www.hulmancenter.org.
These events are free and open to the public!
