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Posted on Dec 20, 2007

National Book Award winner highlights spring speaker series

National Book Award winner Sherman Alexie highlights the spring lineup for President Dianne

 Sherman Alexie

Harrison's Speaker Series.

Alexie, who was honored for his highly autobiographical novel for young people, "The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian," will visit campus April 15.

He credits a creative writing teacher at Washington State University, who gave him an anthology of American Indian writing. In the two decades since then, he's written 19 books of fiction, poetry and essays, although "Absolutely True Diary" is his first work for young adults.

A Spokane/Coeur d'Alene Indian, Alexie, 41, has also had a successful career as a playwright, filmmaker and teacher, and other books and films have drawn on his Indian heritage. But, he told the Seattle Times, "Absolutely True Diary" may be the book that's closest to the life he led.

"I was afraid of my own history," he said in an interview posted on the National Book Awards website. Yet he overcame his anxiety to write of his life in a book that has riveted adolescents.

"The number of brown-skinned teenagers who have embraced the book is so great," he told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. "One kid told me, 'This is like "Catcher in the Rye" for minorities,' and this award

 Dr. Robert Curry

makes it feel like that's true."

The spring series gets under way on Feb. 6 with a talk by Dr. Robert Curry, research science professor at UC-Santa Cruz. His topic will be "It's All About Water: The Coming Water Crisis in California and the Nation." Dr. Curry has served on commissions organized by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, California Department of Forestry, and the U.S. Forest Service. His recent research includes studies of estuarine and freshwater stream restoration projects.

On Feb. 20, Thomas DeWolf will visit campus to talk about his efforts to confront his family's history of slave-trading in his memoir, "Inheriting the Trade."

In 2001, at the age of 47, DeWolf was astounded to discover that he was related to the most successful slave-trading family in American history, a family that was responsible for transporting at least 10,000 Africans to the Americas.

His memoir recounts the journey of 10 of his family members as they retraced the steps of their ancestors through the notorious Triangle Trade -from New England to

 

 Thomas DeWolf

West Africa to Cuba.

The trip proved to be life-altering, forcing DeWolf to face the horrors of slavery and feelings of shame, white male privilege, the complicity of churches, America's historic amnesia regarding slavery, and the nation's desperate need for healing.

It also inspired him to contend with the complicated legacy that continues to affect black and white Americans, Africans and Cubans today. "Inheriting the Trade" provides a persuasive argument that the legacy of slavery isn't merely a Southern issue, but an enduring American one.

The series will continue on March 13 when Dr. Sharon Hays talks about women and welfare.

 Dr. Sharon Hays

Dr. Hays is the Barbra Streisand Professor in Contemporary Gender Studies at the University of Southern California and the author of "Flat Broke with Children: Women in the Age of Welfare Reform."

Her research on single mothers who have relied on welfare finds that they are often pushed into dead-end

employment while the government's emphasis on "family values" encourages them to marry men who can support them. These mixed messages pull welfare recipients and the well-intentioned caseworkers who try to help them in multiple