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Toni Morrison

Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison, M.A. '55, will return to campus for a program March 7 at 4:45 p.m. in Alice Statler Auditorium, titled "Reading the Writing: A Conversation Between Toni Morrison and Claudia Brodsky."

Free tickets are required and will be available at the Willard Straight Hall ticket desk (one ticket per person) beginning Feb. 25 to members of the Cornell community with valid ID, and Feb. 28 to the general public.

Brodsky is a Princeton University professor of comparative literature. She and Morrison have been colleagues and friends for more than 20 years. They co-edited the book "Birth of a Nation'hood: Gaze, Script and Spectacle in the O. J. Simpson Case" (1997).

Morrison will be on campus for two days and is slated to attend a private event at the Africana Studies and Research Center. Her visit is hosted by the Africana Center and the Institute for German Cultural Studies, directed by Professor Leslie Adelson.

"The two of us sat down and both of us were having the same idea simultaneously, to invite her here; and I knew Claudia Brodsky," said Africana Center Director Gerard Aching, M.A. '90, Ph.D. '91, professor of Africana studies and Romance studies. "They've had a series of public conversations, so I asked them to do one of them here."

Organizers have requested that ticketholders be seated in Statler Auditorium by 4:35 p.m. March 7 so that empty seats can be given to waiting non-ticketholders.

"They will be talking about the novel [Morrison's] working on now and other recent writings," Aching said. "I think it's going to be fantastic. What I'm expecting is we're going to have the privilege of listening to these two good friends and colleagues talking about their work."

Morrison last visited Cornell in October 2009 for a public reading from her novel "A Mercy" and a discussion of writing with faculty members.

Her numerous honors include the 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature; the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for "Beloved" and the National Book Critics Award in 1978 for "Song of Solomon." Her works also include "The Bluest Eye," "Jazz," "Sula," "Tar Baby" and "Paradise," children's books and essay collections.

She was the Robert F. Goheen Professor of the Humanities at Princeton from 1989 to 2006 and an A.D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell from 1997 to 2003. She has held lectureships and academic chairs at universities across the U.S. and in Europe, and she was a senior editor at Random House for 20 years.

Information: http://www.asrc.cornell.edu.