Author Ben Yagoda On Developing Style And Voice In Prose Writing, February 17

Chestertown, MD, February 9, 2004 — Washington College's Sophie Kerr Lecture Series presents “The Sound on the Page: Style and Voice in Prose Writing,” a lecture by Ben Yagoda, author of About Town—the recent omnibus history of The New Yorker—and Director of the Journalism Program, University of Delaware. The lecture will be held Tuesday, February 17, at 4:30 p.m. at the O'Neill Literary House. The event is free and the public is invited to attend.

Yagoda is the author of the critically acclaimed booksAbout Town: The New Yorker and the World It Made(Scribner, 2000) and Will Rogers: A Biography (Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), and he is the co-editor of The Art of Fact: A Historical Anthology of Literary Journalism(Scribner, 1997). He has contributed articles, essays and reviews to more than 50 national publications, including Esquire, GQ, New York Times Magazine and the New York Times Book Review, and has been a regular columnist for Philadelphia Magazine and The Chronicle of Higher Education. A graduate of Yale and the University of Pennsylvania, Yagoda is an associate professor of English at the University of Delaware, where he teaches courses in journalism, literary non-fiction and non-fiction writing. He lives in Swarthmore, PA, with his wife and two daughters.

The talk is sponsored by the Sophie Kerr Lecture Series, named in honor of the late Sophie Kerr, a writer from Denton, MD, whose generosity has done so much to enrich Washington College's literary culture. When she died in 1965, she left the bulk of her estate to the College, specifying that one half of the income from her bequest be awarded every year to the senior showing the most “ability and promise for future fulfillment in the field of literary endeavor” and the other half be used to bring visiting writers to campus, to fund scholarships, and to help defray the costs of student publications.