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An evening with Pulitzer Prize-winning author Tracy Kidder will be the first event in this semester’s Lowell Humanities Series. Kidder will come to campus on Feb. 5 to discuss his works, which include House, Among Schoolchildren, Old Friends, Mountains Beyond Mountains and, most recently, Good Prose — an entertaining treatise about writing and friendship.
[All Humanities Series events take place at 7 p.m. in Gasson 100, unless noted otherwise.]
Another Pulitzer Prize winner, poet Tracy K. Smith, will visit on Feb. 20 as part of the University’s annual “Poetry Days.” Smith’s collections of poems have received various honors, including from the New York Times and the Academy of American poets.
On March 19, Michael Bérubé, whose books encompass cultural studies, disability rights, liberal politics, and debates in higher education, will present “Bioethics: Too Important to be Left to Bioethicists.” Bérubé is former president of the Modern Language Association.
New Yorker staff writer George Packer will discuss his widely acclaimed book The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America on March 26. A New York Times bestseller, The Unwinding won the National Book Award for non-fiction last year.
Haitian native Edwidge Danticat, a former National Book Prize finalist whose honors also include a Pushcart Short Story Prize and awards from The Caribbean Writer, Seventeen and Essence, will begin a three-day residency at Boston College with an appearance on April 1, sponsored in part through Fiction Days.
Concluding the 2013-14 academic year Humanities Series will be a talk on April 9 by Dublin-born writer Emma Donoghue, “Slippery Characters: Writing Historical Fiction in the Information Age.” Donoghue is the award-winning author of the novels Room, The Sealed Letter, Landing, Hood and the forthcoming Frog Music; short-story collections Astray, Three and a Half Deaths and Kissing the Witch; and literary history including two anthologies that span the 17th-20th centuries. Donoghue’s lecture will take place in Fulton 511.
For more on the Lowell Humanities Series, see www.bc.edu/lowell.