Acclaimed Biographer Ron Chernow Featured Guest of College Convocation February 24

CHESTERTOWN, MD—One of America’s most celebrated and influential historians, Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Ron Chernow, will be the honored guest at the 2012 George Washington’s Birthday Convocation at Washington College on Friday, February 24. Chernow will receive an honorary doctorate and deliver remarks based on his most recent book, Washington: A Life, a biography of the nation’s first president (and Washington College’s founding patron) that earned Chernow the 2011 Pulitzer Prize in Biography.

The special Convocation will begin at 3:30 p.m. in Decker Theatre, inside the Gibson Center for the Arts on the Washington College campus, 300 Washington Avenue. The event, which is free and open to the public, will be followed by a reception in the Underwood Lobby of the Gibson Center.

Ron Chernow has won countless awards for bringing important figures from American history to vivid life on the nonfiction page. His first book, The House of Morgan, won a National Book Award in 1990, and the Modern Library Board selected it as one of the 100 best nonfiction books of the 20th century.

Each of his subsequent books has met with similarly lavish praise and accolades, starting with The Warburgs, a portrait of an influential German-Jewish banking family published in 1993, and followed by The Death of the Banker, a 1997 collection of essays; Titan, his best-selling 1998 biography of John D. Rockefeller; and the 2004 biography Alexander Hamilton, winner of the first George Washington Book Prize, which is presented by Washington College, the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, and Mount Vernon to the year’s best nonfiction book written about the Founding Era.

In October 2010, The Penguin Press published Mr. Chernow’s long-awaited biography of George Washington. The 904-page tome racked up an impressive list of awards and honors that culminated with the Pulitzer. Writing in The New York Review of Books, Gordon Wood praised the work as “the best, most comprehensive, and most balanced single-volume biography of Washington ever written.” In March 2011, the New-York Historical Society gave the book the coveted American History Book Prize, endowing Mr. Chernow with the honorary title of American Historian Laureate.

A frequent contributor to The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Chernow is a familiar figure on national radio and television shows and has appeared in numerous documentaries. He recently served as president of PEN American Center, the country’s preeminent organization of authors. An honors graduate of Yale and Cambridge, he lives in Brooklyn, New York.

The Birthday Convocation is also the time when the College recognizes the special contributions of an alumnus, a community member and outstanding employees. This year, public relations executive Kevin O’Keefe ’74, president of the Baltimore office of Weber Shandwick, will receive the Alumni Service Award in recognition of the time and expertise he has shared with his alma mater through the years. Educator Molly Judge, head of Chestertown’s Radcliffe Creek School, which serves children with learning differences and has collaborated with the College on special projects related to teacher training, will receive the President’s Medal.

In addition, President Mitchell Reiss will present Distinguished Service Awards to four College employees—Director of Creative Services Diane Landskroener ’76 M’81, Director of Communications Marcia Landskroener M’02, Health Services nurse Carol Thornton, and Business Management professor Terry Scout—to recognize their long and exemplary service to the College.

On Saturday evening, February 25, the College will host its annual George Washington’s Birthday Ball, a formal affair that further celebrates the life of the Father of the Country. In 1781, General Washington gave his name and 50 guineas to the founding of the College at Chester, now Washington College. He also served on the first Board of Visitors and Governors and, in 1789, three months after becoming President of the United States of America, accepted an honorary degree from the College.

For more information on Convocation and Birthday Ball, please visit http://www.washcoll.edu/birthdayball/.

Photo credit: Nina Subin

Pulitzer Prize Winning Poet W.D. Snodgrass To Read At Washington College, October 16

Chestertown, MD, October 13, 2003 — Pulitzer Prize winning poet W.D. Snodgrass will read at Washington College on Thursday, October 16, at 7 p.m. in the Sophie Kerr Room of the Miller Library. All are invited to this free event.
William DeWitt Snodgrass was born in Wilkinsburg, PA, in 1926. His more than twenty books of poetry include The Fuehrer Bunker: The Complete Cycle (1995); Each in His Season (1993); Selected Poems, 1957-1987; The Führer Bunker: A Cycle of Poems in Progress (1977), which was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry; After Experience (1968); and Heart's Needle (1959), which won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1960. He has also produced two books of literary criticism, To Sound Like Yourself: Essays on Poetry (2003) and In Radical Pursuit (1975), and six volumes of translation. His honors include an Ingram Merrill Foundation award and a special citation from the Poetry Society of America, and fellowships from The Academy of American Poets, the Ford Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Snodgrass is often credited with being one of the founding members of the “confessional” school of poetry—a classification he vigorously eschews—having had a tremendous impact on that facet of contemporary poetry. “Like other confessional poets, Snodgrass is at pains to reveal the repressed, violent feelings that often lurk beneath the seemingly placid surface of everyday life,” observed critic David McDuff. Snodgrass' later works also show a widening vision, applying the lessons of self-examination to the problems of modern society. In style and technique, Snodgrass' poetry “successfully bridged the directness of contemporary free verse with the demands of the academy,” according to Thomas Lask of The New York Times.
The reading is sponsored by the Sophie Kerr Committee, which carries on the legacy of 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.