Celebrity Lectures

American novelist Amy Tan, the daughter of Chinese immigrants, has focused her writing on the cultural and generational differences among Asian-American women. Her best known novel, The Joy Luck Club, explores the relationships between Chinese women ...
Arthur Miller (1915- ) is an acclaimed American playwright whose works confront moral and political issues and describe the pressures society puts on people. Aside from his marriage to Marilyn Monroe, Miller is probably best known for his 1949 maste...
Joyce Carol Oates (1938- ) is an American author who taught English at the University of Detroit and the University of Windsor, Ontario and has been affiliated with Princeton University since 1978. Oates writes about contemporary American life, which...
American dancer and choreographer Judith Jamison made her New York debut with the American Ballet Theatre in 1964. Jamison’s fame began to build when she joined the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre in 1965, the company of which she would become ar...
Author Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. was born in Indianapolis, Indiana on November 11, 1922. Vonnegut’s literature is well-known for its satirical approach to twentieth century concerns in regards to new technology and the impact of modern war. The satirist ha...
Margaret Atwood was born in Ottawa and grew up in northern Ontario, Quebec, and Toronto, Canada. She is best known as the author of editions such as The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) and The Edible Woman (1969). Each work addresses popular contemporary iss...
Renaissance woman Maya Angelou is a poet, author, playwright, professional stage and screen producer, director, and performer. One of her best known written works is I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1970), a humorous autobiography set in segregated A...
Controversial writer Norman Mailer used his personal experiences to invigorate the nonfiction novel. Born in Long Branch, New Jersey and raised in Brooklyn, New York, Mailer received his S.B. in engineering from Harvard in 1943, and was drafted for W...
Author Pat Conroy, born October 26, 1945 in Atlanta, Georgia, was the oldest of seven children. Since his father was a figure in the military, Conroy moved frequently and eventually graduated from the Citadel Military Academy in Charleston, South Car...
Paul Theroux is known for a wide spectrum of publications, encompassing novels, children’s books, and magazine contributions. He is most widely noted for his collection of travel books, including Riding the Iron Rooster (1988), The Great Railway Baz...
Philip Roth was born in 1933 in Newark, New Jersey, which would later be the setting for many of his early novels. Noted for his ironic take on the issues of identity and sexuality within the life of the middle-class Jewish American, Roth first gaine...
American novelist Richard Ford was born in Jackson, Mississippi, though he denies his status as a southern writer. Ford has written five novels, his best known being The Sportswriter (1986), a first-person account in the life of novelist-turned-sport...
Writer and critic Susan Sontag was born in New York and grew up in Arizona and California. Sontag entered University of California Berkeley when she was fifteen, and subsequently studied at University of Chicago, Harvard, and the University of Paris....
Popular African-American writer Terry McMillan was born on October 18, 1951 and grew up in Port Huron, Michigan. She attended the University of California, Berkeley, graduating with a bachelor's degree in journalism. While still at Berkeley, she wrot...
Born and raised in Richmond, Virginia, American author and journalist Tom Wolfe obtained fame for his experimental writing style known as New Journalism, introduced in his 1968 novel The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby. Wolfe worked for...
Novelist Tony Hillerman was born in Sacred Heart, Oklahoma, where he was raised amongst the Pottawatomie and Seminole Indians. Hillerman attended Oklahoma State University, the University of Oklahoma, and the University of New Mexico. He is known fo...
William Kennedy is credited with bringing his native city of Albany, New York to life within the literary world. His novels, in what has been deemed his “Albany Cycle,” include Legs (1975), Billy Phelan's Greatest Game (1978), and the Pulitzer Priz...
August Wilson, an American playwright and poet, was born in Pittsburgh on April 27, 1945. His experiences growing up in a poor black community in Pittsburgh gained him valuable insight into the plight of blacks in American society, which he has draw...
Carlos Fuentes (1928- ), a Mexican writer and editor, is also an accomplished diplomat, having served as head of the department of cultural relations in Mexico’s ministry of foreign affairs (1950-1959) and as the Mexican ambassador to France (1975-1...
David Halberstam [1934-] is one of America's most distinguished journalists and historians, whose newspaper reporting and books have helped define our era. In 1960, after having covered the early civil rights struggle for the Nashville Tennessean, Ha...
David McCullough (1933- ) is well known as the author of one of the most popular and well-respected biographies in recent memory, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Truman (1992). His works also include The Johnstown Flood (1968), The Path Between Seas (1977...
Derek Walcott (1930- ) is a West Indian writer whose poems and dramas exhibit his deft control of language as he infuses the English language with a rich mix of Latin, French, and patois. The son a British father and a West Indian mother, Walcott dr...
E.L. Doctorow (1931- ), an American novelist born in New York City, is known for his works of historical fiction. Doctorow's work, highly regarded and controversial, is distinguished by deep philosophical inquiry, a subtle and varied prose style, an...
Edward Albee (1928- ), an American dramatist born in Washington, D.C., has been one of the foremost playwrights of his day, whose work initiated a new theatrical movement in America. His ground-breaking plays are an indictment of American society, w...
Garry Wills, raised in Michigan in a devout Catholic family, is a cultural historian and author who has written nearly thirty books over his career. Some of his works include Nixon Agonistes (1970), Reagan’s America (1987), Why I Am a Catholic (200...
Isabel Allende (1942- ), niece of former Chilean president Salvador Allende, is one of today’s most prominent Chilean writers. She has lived many years in California, having lived abroad ever since the 1973 coup that deposed her uncle. Her fictio...
Jacques d’Amboise (1934- ), recognized as one of the finest classical dancers of our time, has devoted his life to the arts and the promotion of arts education. Best known for his roles in American works such as Filling Station and Western Symphony...
Jane Smiley (1949- ) a novelist born in Los Angeles, California, has written twelve works of fiction covering a wide array of topics, including politics, farming, horse training, impulse buying, Barbie, and marriage. Some of her works include The Ag...
John Irving (1942- ) an author born in Exeter, New Hampshire, first received major recognition for his fourth novel, The World According to Garp (1978). Nominated for a National Book Award, this novel describes the career of a novelist and typifies ...
John Updike (1932- ), a remarkably prolific American novelist, poet, and short-story writer, was born in Shillington, Pennsylvania and graduated from Harvard in 1954. His considerable talent is evident from his writings, which reveal a well-controll...
Joseph Heller (1923-1999) was a surreal novelist whose 1961 classic Catch-22 (1961) remains a seminal, antiwar novel. The term “catch-22,” coined in this novel, has become a part of the American vernacular, now used to refer to any illogical or pa...