Events Sponsored by The Office of Diversity and Inclusion
Spring Semester, Academic Year 2010-2011
Compelling Conversation with Gail Collins
N.Y. Times Columnist and Author
Tuesday, February 22, 2011 at 1:00 p.m. in A-300.
Gail Collins originally joined the New York Times as a member of the editorial board and later became an Op-Ed columnist. In 2001, she became the first woman ever appointed editor of the Times’ editorial page. Before joining the Times, Collins was a columnist at New York Newsday and the New York Daily News. She also founded the Connecticut State News Bureau, which was the largest news service of its kind in the country until its sale in the late 1970s.
Collins’ best-selling books include: When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present, America’s Women, and Scorpion Tongues: Gossip, Celebrity & American Politics.
Compelling Conversations Speaker Series
Black History Month Celebration:
“Henson, Peary, and The North Pole Legacy” with Dr. Allen Counter
Neurologist, Explorer and Human Rights Activist
Thursday, February 24, 2011 at 1:00 p.m. in C-202.
Dr. Counter is a long-time admirer of Matthew Henson, the African American who discovered the North Pole with Admiral Robert Peary in 1909 and was denied his place in history because of his race. Counter travelled to the remote villages above the Arctic Circle and discovered living sons of Peary and Henson that they had fathered with Eskimo women while on their1905-1906 expedition.
Counter subsequently brought about a reunion between the Eskimo Pearys and Hensons and their American relatives. His book, North Pole Legacy, reveals the results of Dr. Counter’s successful campaign to bring recognition to Henson’s name, including his reinterment in Arlington National Cemetery and his posthumous receipt of the Hubbard Medal, the National Geographic Society’s greatest honor. Join us for an inspiring story of the power of family and honor to overcome the injustices of history and race.
International Women’s Day Celebration with ZiliMisik
Monday, March 8, 2011 from 4:30 p. m. to 6:30 p.m. in the B 2nd Level Lobby.
An all-women band, Zili Misik has been bridging cultures, generations and continents for ten years. With captivating sounds that evoke the African continent, Zili retraces routes of forced exile and cultural resistance through rhythm and song. Powerful Haitian, Brazilian and West African rythms infuse Zili’s original creations and traditional folksongs.
Reconnecting Haitian misik rasin, Jamaican roots reggae, Afro-Brazilian samba, Afro-Cuban son, and African American spirituals, blues, jazz and neo soul, Zili Misik honors its influences while creating a sound that is uniquely its own. Zili’s lyrics glide seamlessly from English to Kreyol to Portuguese to Spanish, spinning tales and visions of lives lived and yet to be.
Compelling Conversation with Rubin “Hurricane” Carter
Civil Rights Activist and Former Champion Boxer
Thursday, March 24, 2011 at 1:00 p.m. in A300.
Rubin “Hurricane” Carter was a formidable boxer who had won the European Light Welterweight Championship for two years in a row and knocked out Emile Griffith in the first round when his promising career was cut short. In 1966, he was falsely arrested for the murder of three white people in a bar. Sentenced to a triple life-sentence, Carter always maintained his innocence. Subjected to a nineteen-year travesty of justice, he was finally set free in 1985 by a federal court. His story was immortalized in a Bob Dylan song and made into a Hollywood movie starring Denzel Washington.
Carter has chronicled his own life in two books, The Sixteenth Round, and 2011’s Eye of the Hurricane: My Path from Darkness to Freedom. He now devotes much of his time to speaking out on behalf of the wrongly convicted.
Compelling Conversations Speaker Series
One Book Presentation with Sonia Nazario
Pulitzer Prize-Winning Journalist and Author of Enrique’s Journey
Thursday, April 7, 2011 at 1:00 p.m. in A300.
They call it “the train of death.” Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Sonia Nazario clung to the top of a freight train with a young Honduran boy named Enrique on his brave odyssey to reunite with his mother in the United States. Chronicling her experience in her astonishing book, Enrique’s Journey, based upon her newspaper series that won the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing, she offers a gripping personal perspective on one of the most challenging and divisive issues today: immigration.
In sharing the epic journey that thousands of immigrant children make each year to find their mothers in the US, Nazario further explores the perils modern day immigrants face. With a reporter’s eye to the truth, she humanizes the issue, posing new perspectives that fall on both sides, while offering solutions destined to change the national dialogue on the influx of immigrants and the effect they will have on the state of the nation.
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