campus news and events

Colby-Sawyer College Presents Pulitzer Prize-winning Author and Civil Rights Activist Diane McWhorter

Colby-Sawyer College's Cultural Events Committee will host Pulitzer Prize-winning author Diane McWhorter for a talk on Thursday, March 20 at 7 p.m. in Wheeler Hall at the Ware Student Center. The event is free and open to the public.

A journalist and commentator, McWhorter travels extensively to lecture on race, freedom and justice. She is the author of Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama — The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution (Simon & Schuster), a dramatic account of the civil rights era battle in her hometown and her family's involvement. Carry Me Home won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction, the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize, the Southern Book Award for Nonfiction, the Sidney Hillman Foundation Award, the Clarence Cason Award, the Horace Mann Bond Book Award from Harvard University's W.E.B. Du Bois Institute, and the English-Speaking Union Ambassador Award. In 2011 Time named Carry Me Home to its list of the 100 best nonfiction books published since the magazine's 1923 founding.

McWhorter's young adult history of the civil rights movement, A Dream of Freedom, was published by Scholastic in 2004 and was a New York Times Notable Children's Book of 2004 and USA Today's “Best Children's History.” Her work has also been anthologized in such collections as These United States: Original Essays by Leading American Writers on Their State within the Union, Stories from the Blue Moon Café IV and Class Matters.

A longtime contributor to The New York Times, McWhorter has written articles on race, politics, and culture that have appeared in The Nation, Slate, The American Scholar, The Washington Post, Smithsonian, Legal Affairs, Harper's and Boston Magazine. She has been an adjunct instructor of creative nonfiction at Columbia University's graduate School of the Arts and is a member of the Society of American Historians.

Raised in Birmingham and educated at Wellesley College, McWhorter graduated magna cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Comparative Literature. She was a 2007 Holtzbrinck Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, a 2009 Guggenheim fellow, a 2010 residential scholar at the Rockefeller Foundation in Bellagio, a 2011-12 fellow at Harvard University's Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and a 2012-2013 fellow at Harvard's W.E.B. Du Bois Institute/Hutchins Center. Currently she is the A.M. Rosenthal Writer-in-Residence at the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.

For more information, contact Academic Dean Burton Kirkwood at (603)526-3761 or burton.kirkwood@colby-sawyer.edu.

– Anurup Upadhyay '15

Anurup Upadhyay is a Business major at Colby-Sawyer College and a student writer for College Communications.


Colby-Sawyer College is a comprehensive college that integrates the liberal arts and sciences with professional preparation. Founded in 1837, Colby-Sawyer is located in the scenic Lake Sunapee Region of central New Hampshire. Learn more about the college's vibrant teaching and learning community at www.colby-sawyer.edu.

Colby-Sawyer College, 541 Main Street, New London, N.H. 03257 (603) 526-3000