Professor-at-Large Toni Morrison, Cornell MFA '55, the 1993 Nobel laureate in literature and the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Beloved, will present a free and open lecture on literature and public life Tuesday, Nov. 17, at 7:30 p.m. in Bailey Hall on the Cornell University campus.

Free tickets for the lecture will be available on a first-come, first-served basis at the Willard Straight Hall ticket office beginning Tuesday, Nov. 10, at 10 a.m., with a limit of two per person.

Morrison will participate in a discussion of her novel Beloved with the community-based reading group Sistas Reading Sistas Thursday, Nov. 19, at 7:30 p.m. in the Willard Straight Hall Theatre. The discussion will be followed, at 8:30 p.m., by a showing of the just-released film based on the novel, produced by and starring Oprah Winfrey. Free tickets for the Beloved discussion and film, which is open to the public, will be available at the Willard Straight ticket office beginning Monday, Nov. 16, at 10 a.m., with a limit of one per person.

As an Andrew D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell, Morrison, the Robert F. Goheen Professor in the Council of Humanities at Princeton University, will spend four days on campus -- Monday and Tuesday, Nov. 16 and 17, and Thursday and Friday, Nov. 19 and 20.

Morrison will give a colloquium with English department faculty and students who have discussed her work in their classes, and she will meet with creative writing students. She will participate in a roundtable discussion with faculty and invited guests of Cornell's Africana Studies and Research Center, join Professor Anne Adams' class, Major Black World Writing, meet with Cornell Tradition undergraduate students and the Black Graduate Student Association. In addition to the campus public events, Morrison will give a public reading at the St. James A.M.E. Zion Church in Ithaca, which is a national historic site as one of the stops of the Underground Railroad.

Morrison is the author of six novels in addition to Beloved: The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon, Tar Baby, Jazz and Paradise. She is the first black woman to hold a named chair at an Ivy League university; prior to her Princeton position, she was a senior editor at Random House for 20 years, the Albert Schweitzer Professor of the Humanities at the State University of New York in Albany, and a visiting lecturer at Yale University.

Morrison joins 15 other current A.D. White Professors-at-Large at Cornell; these are outstanding individuals from the sciences, humanities and arts, who over six-year terms make periodic visits to campus and are considered full members of the faculty.